


a word like tiger

by bellis



Category: Black Sails
Genre: M/M, Multi, and briefer appearances by some others, brief appearances by John Silver, frequent appearances by Miranda's ghost
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-01-17
Updated: 2016-12-12
Packaged: 2018-05-14 12:30:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 28,236
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5743942
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bellis/pseuds/bellis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Forgiveness is a word like tiger - there’s footage of it and verifiably it exists but few of us have seen it close and wild or known it for what it is. (Jeanette Winterson, The Gap of Time)</p><p>A few months after Charlestown, Flint finds out that Thomas is alive. This is, by all accounts, terrible timing.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

He returns to Charlestown a few months later. In the governor’s house, he stands in front of the clock that marked the moment everything went to ruins the second time. He wonders how he didn’t notice it when she did. God knows he spent enough time, a lifetime ago, casting furtive glances at its face, willing the hands onwards toward the point where everyone else would have left, and he’d be alone with Thomas.

 

Charlestown is ghostly. Or it would be, if this were a different land. The heat is sweltering, the sun bright in a cloudless sky, and if there are ghosts, they will surely all be lounging together in the deep shade of some tree a bit further inland, where the air is cooler and the light less blinding.

 

His ship is anchored in the bay, the crew tense and sullen, although they didn’t make their feelings all too well known. They have a new respect for the Flint that came out of the ashes of Charlestown. Something made it immediately clear to them, that day, that whatever it had been that had made him vulnerable, fallible before, was gone. Perhaps it’s his wordlessness, and what little he says when he does speak. There are no more speeches, and perhaps they recognize that for what it means: the idealism is drained out of his motives, his world is stripped down to the bones, a skeleton of simple facts, and he treats it as such. Steal, fight, kill, oppose. It requires little argument, and brooks none.

 

Still, this journey doesn’t sit well with them, and they certainly would have protested if he still were the Flint of some weeks ago. The window is a narrow one: between the smoke clearing and the British returning to the ruins of Charlestown. There’s a chance the Navy will happen upon them, and the risk is hardly justifiable.

 

There is nothing left here of any value. The British cleared the ruins not long after Vane’s men set the town ablaze, and they would have taken anything of value, and buried the dead. But James didn’t come because he thought he’d find anything here. Or anyone. And even if he could have still found Miranda, she would have been only bones and dust.

 

And yet, in the end he couldn’t help it. He feels that at the very least, he needs to be here once more and say good-bye to her properly. Not running, cannonballs blasting the town apart around him, blood on his hands (again, always) and rage in his heart. A calmer, quieter farewell won’t wash his sins away, nothing will, and Miranda might not care anymore about one such as him, what he has finally become, paying his respects to her, but perhaps their history never did or will stop counting for something, so he’ll offer her what he can.

 

As he walked through the streets, he kept his eyes trimmed on collapsed walls and caved-in roofs, not the ground. The ground is spattered and mottled with dark brown. Faded with the rains that have passed through since the day it hailed cannonballs, but still there, clear as writing. Innocent blood, and he swears he can smell it even now, and taste iron on his tongue.

 

The governor’s house is half gone, half holding its breath. He treads carefully, but the floor is solid enough, and he finds the clock still where it was that day. It survived the destruction, although it isn’t wholly unscathed. Moisture has warped the wood, and some of the inlaid work has fallen out, puzzle pieces on the floor. The door is ajar and he tries to push it closed again on impulse, but it only bounces back and creaks open wider than before.

 

There’s a bundle of documents at the bottom, tied together with string, the paper stiff and blotchy with humidity. James holds it in his hands for some minutes, torn between just dropping it there, and looking through it. It seems like a pointless effort. Peter Ashe is gone and whatever business he had that warranted a hiding place, has no bearing on James’s present. He feels unspeakably tired, and the papers feel unreasonably heavy. He smells the damp wood, and the sea on the wind, and feels the familiar sense of mute, weary disbelief that comes with the realisation that, yes, this is real, this is the present moment. Even though it shouldn’t be, and nothing in the world seems right.

 

In the end, he unties the string and unfolds the papers, one after the other; the first is illegible. Billows of pale grey and spots of brown. The second, faint lines, too blurry to decipher. The third is words, faded, but clear enough on the page. James frowns, and can’t quite breathe for a moment, and then it passes; just until his eyes catch on the date, and he stops breathing altogether.

 

He would recognize Thomas’s handwriting anywhere, he doesn’t need to check the signature at the end of the letter, even though he does stare at it for minutes, trying to make sense of what he has in his hands. The date on the letter is just over two years ago.

 

*

 

He writes a letter, and spends a week of rest- and sleeplessness on New Providence. Half the days in Miranda’s empty house, with only rum for company, and the rest in Nassau, giving his crew every reason to conclude he’s finally lost his mind for good.

 

His mind turns the same thing over and over and over. He can’t understand why Peter didn’t tell them. He can’t comprehend how wrong everything went that day.

 

James isn’t one to think _what if._ Perhaps he used to be, a long time ago, sitting up beside Miranda on a voyage that seemed to take an eternity; every bone in his body and every one of his heartstrings straining backwards toward the horizon, beyond which England had vanished into a leaden sky. Imagining he were there, not on a ship bound for the Caribbean; imagining being with Thomas, _no matter how_. Then in Nassau, he imagined returning. Planned, and worked tirelessly, and imagined. He stopped the day the only letter Peter ever sent them, arrived.

 

But now he’s falling back on old habits. _What if_ he hadn’t been too caught up in the moment, the realisation of what, to notice the colonel come back into the room, and raise his weapon at Miranda. What if they had sat down again, and Peter had told them Thomas was alive. _Thomas died in a cold, dark place—But he didn’t._ What if Peter had sent a second letter, two years earlier, just on the off-chance it would still find its way to James McGraw and Miranda Hamilton. _I had word from Thomas today. He asks if I know where you went_. _I told him I believed you still in Nassau. I expect he will look for you there._

 

James has given up pouring the rum into a cup and drinks it straight from the bottle. He reads Thomas’s letter over and over, as if by doing so, he might find out if Peter ever did reply. If he ever did write the words, _They went to Nassau. To the best of my knowledge, they are still there._ And then he gets caught up in Thomas’s words instead, their easy eloquence, and the proof of Peter’s claim so clear in them that James doesn’t know if it’s shame or anger that he feels most.

 

Thomas did forgive Peter. It’s a letter to a friend.

 

The rum is beginning to burn on his lips and his gums, so he takes another swig, and pinches the bridge of his nose, and tries to stop remembering all so clearly the kindness and empathy with which Thomas treated everyone around him, or feeling all too keenly how far he has removed himself from the things that Thomas might have loved in him.

 

He can’t believe how wrong it all went. For all his imagining, he can’t cast the last ten years of his life into a shape that he could believe Thomas would view with understanding as well. Perhaps it isn’t even all the lines he’s crossed. But some of them. And most of all those one or two deep inside his heart that he stopped holding sacred in the months since Charlestown.

 

Sometimes he’s sure he’ll never be able to get up from the floor of Miranda’s house, or the chair in Eleanor’s tavern again, but then he thinks he’ll bear ten times the weight of everything he’s done since he became James Flint, and being judged for it all if he must, but he will find Thomas and tell him the two things he was certain he’d never get to say, except to the emptiness of the night. _I’m sorry I left you._ And, _I love you_.

 


	2. Chapter 2

As he steps from the boat onto a cold, dusty Antwerp pier, he feels a nervousness, nearly giddy, that he only recognises from a long time ago, when he was much younger and trying to achieve things bright and airy, his mind set on rising above the station that had been allotted him.

 

He thinks of his lieutenant’s examination, and the first few times he had to speak in front of his superiors, and realises how little he’s remembered that part of his life since the last time he left this part of the world behind. As though everything only began with the moment he met Thomas.

 

He supposes that in many ways, it did.

 

In the pocket of his coat, he can feel the letter, the brittle paper uneven with the tropical climate it soaked up for so long. Antwerp sounds and smells and looks so very different.

 

James had forgotten what temperate places are like at this time of year. How the winter settles into everything, stone and air and bones, and won’t yield until it’s seen days and days of sunshine. As he begins to make his way through the town, he nearly wonders how the people stand it; the cold and odd, sombre stillness that inhabits everything like a hush.

 

Dusk is settling, and the city is greys and blues, frosted and darkening, all muted; but while he walks, the streets are also filling with people setting out towards their evenings’ engagements, families, small groups, and couples, and they seem to mind very little. He was one of them once, nearly at least, he knew what the things were that they fret over and he did the things they do, but tonight he can barely recall a single one of those things, and the voices that come back to him from that past life seem to speak in a language he has entirely forgotten.

 

He finds he can’t fathom their lives anymore, but he also knows that Miranda could, if she were with him. She’d smile and breathe much more freely than in the close, ever-overheated climate of the tropics. To her, an evening such as this would be lit-up drawing-rooms, clavichords, wine, conversation. Because Nassau was always exile to her, halt and suspension, not end and beginning to her salvation.

 

Something closes up in his chest and aches and he stops abruptly, just halfway across a square. _How did it all go so wrong?_ If she were here with him now, the world would be so unimaginably close to being right again, mending itself. If Thomas really is where the outside of his letter says he might be. And if she were here now.

 

James blinks, and breathes in the bitingly cold air, the taste of smoke in the back of his throat. He reaches for the letter in his pocket again, and slowly walks on, another narrow alley and another corner, and then he stops again at the side of a wider street.

 

He spent the passage across the Atlantic in a feverish state, his whole body thrumming with a longing he has barely ever known in his life, and an impatience for the water to rush past faster, the sun to speed up his laborious crawl across the sky day in day out, a frustration that all of it would just happen at its own pace. He stared at the horizon until it vanished and the sky plunged into the sea or the sea rushed into the firmament, and he thought that everything else he knew was dissolving in the same way.

 

 _What do I do_ , he thought, _How in the world do I look at you, how do I touch you again with these hands and speak to you with this tongue._

 

But he couldn’t wait to look and touch and hear Thomas’s voice again.

 

Now, he can’t move.

 

Across the street is the house, solid stone, a real structure in a real place that exists in this very moment, and there is light inside that drifts like snow slowly and softly down onto the frozen ground outside.

 

He’d never have thought he’d feel this much turmoil, this much uncertainty in a moment like this.

 

A moment in which he _knows_ Thomas must be alive. It was the dream he had when his dreams weren’t nightmares, it was the one thing he begged fate for when he couldn’t keep himself together anymore, all the more desperately for knowing it would never be so. It’s the one thing he knew for certain would never be true.

 

Yet now, it is. And he’s half scared and half breathless, and all flight instinct. So he does the only thing he can think to do before he runs, and crosses the street.

 

*

 

His knees nearly give out when Thomas suddenly is there in front of him.

 

His hands feel numb and his eyes burn.

 

*

 

Not in a thousand years would he have believed that he could have forgotten even the most minute detail about Thomas, but the moment he sees him across the room, the moment Thomas says his name, he realises that he had forgotten. The precise curve of Thomas’s lips, and just how the corners of his eyes crinkle when he smiles, and how his voice really sounds.

 

He feels like he’s suddenly come up from a nightmare. _He returns at last._

_Ten years. Feels like a hundred times as long._

 

“You almost arrived before your letter,” Thomas says. His voice sounds just a little breathless then, and James’s impulse is to close the distance that remains between them and wrap Thomas in his arms. But he can’t.

 

When he arrived, a maid showed him into this room, her large, young eyes following him like an apparition. Perhaps it was only curiosity, but he thinks he saw fright, and all he can do now is imagine what she must have seen. He knows he doesn’t recognise himself some days, hasn’t really recognised himself at all since Charlestown, but Thomas looks to him so much like he did the last time they were together in London that his chest aches, longing and regret heavy as lead.

 

_I love you now like I did then, but I’ve turned into a monster._

 

He says, “I know,” and has to fight to keep his voice even. “It seemed to make sense to write, but I then realised I couldn’t wait that long.”

 

Thomas laughs, the same quiet huff that’s so familiar to James, and if he hears the relief in it, he’s too overwrought to wonder what it’s over. There’s a beat where neither of them moves or speaks. James finds himself asking, _What now?_ , his tongue overcrowded with things he wishes were already out in the open, and wishes he never had to say. Thomas finally does what must be the only sensible thing just then, and pours them wine.

 

“I,” James begins, and can’t go on for a while. He’d hoped against hope that there would be a space, a stretch of time, where the reality of the past ten years would stay at the edges of the room, the edge of his field of vision; where he’d just get to drink Thomas in and allow himself the relief of the end of a decade of pain. Paradoxically, he finds he couldn’t bear it. It would feel like another betrayal, a lie, and if there’s anything he can imagine to be capable of saving him, it’s baring his soul to Thomas.

 

“She’s dead, Thomas.”

 

The sound of the decanter hitting the table is loud, as if it slipped from Thomas’s hand.

 

His back is turned to James, and for some minutes, he’s still as a statue, and silent. The room is like a painting, the fire the only living thing, moving and whispering, drinking the reality out of everything again. _This is how it is, although nothing in the world is right._ The spell only breaks when Thomas releases a breath, and asks, “When?”

 

“Not six months ago.” _How did it all go so very wrong._

 

Thomas finally turns around again, his movements measured like he needs to control himself. When he offers a glass to James, his eyes are very bright. He doesn’t make any effort to hide his tears.

 

“Tell me what happened.”

 

So James does, because there’s nothing for it. He talks about going to Charlestown, about talking to Peter, and Abigail. How they tried and tried and tried to realise what they’d dreamt up all those years ago, what they’d come so very far already in achieving, what they lost so much over. He doesn’t say what precisely he did sometimes, believing it was a means to their end, but the individual weights of all the deaths and lies and compromises pile themselves up on his shoulder until he thinks his knees may buckle, and he sits. _It was all so much harder without you to tell black and white apart for me_.

 

Thomas has gone to the window, rolling the glass back and forth between his fingers, watching the street outside. His profile is soft in the golden light of the room, and for all the world he could be lost in thoughts, at ease.

 

James draws a breath that hitches in his throat, because _I love you_ , but does that matter anymore?

 

“We thought we finally had a way. It was her idea, she insisted on coming. I shouldn’t have let her, but it was—it was a bit like going back.” He pauses and rubs a hand across his face. He sees Miranda often enough in his mind when he isn’t careful. Her faith and her love and her determination that day, and her blazing rage, and her protectiveness. And her unseeing eyes and her blood. It’s difficult to conjure it all up willingly. “One of Peter’s men shot her.” He can’t look at Thomas while he recounts it all, but he can tell that Thomas feels the word like the real, physical thing. _Shot_. “There was no reason, he just did it. I never saw it coming.” He stops because his voice is breaking.

 

There’s a beat of silence, then Thomas, his voice tight, pleading, incredulous, says, “You’re not making any sense.”

 

 _No,_ James thinks, it doesn’t make sense. _It makes no sense that we thought we lost you when all we had to do was to look for you, and a heartbeat before I found you by chance, I lost her._

 

He doesn’t know when he drank the wine, but he grows aware now of how it has already crept into his head, drenched his already hopeless daze until it’s become dead weight. He can’t look at Thomas, so he closes his eyes and wishes with all his heart he could find a way to cross the chasm between them, to hold Thomas close and kiss him and forget everything else and be comforted by the only person in the world who understands what Miranda meant to him.

 

But he can’t guess if he still has any right to such comfort, and it’s too soon now, far too soon to ask, or to try.

 

His eyes open of their own accord when he senses Thomas move, and he looks up to watch Thomas sit across from him. He has brushed away his tears, but his eyes aren’t dry. “Why would anyone shoot her?”

 

James smiles, almost involuntarily. _Because no one can forgive the things you can forgive. Because we couldn’t bear what you accepted_. “Because we didn’t know that it was Peter who sold us out. We never knew until that day. And I wouldn’t have been any the wiser, but Miranda—” _Miranda and her love of life, the life we used to share. The life she so wanted back with such fervour, despite everything. She recognised all the traces of the past, of_ you _._

 

“You had that clock,” he says, and for a moment it seems so painfully, tragically unlikely. A goddamned clock. “In your drawing room in London. And it was there in Peter’s house. And she figured it all out. She was so furious. She was yelling at Peter. And Peter’s man was looking for an excuse to kill us, so he did, her.”

 

Thomas doesn’t say anything for a long time. He’s looking away from James, gaze unfocussed, caught on something invisible to James. When he speaks again, his voice is even and distant, and very gentle.

 

“You told me a story once, one that your grandfather had told you, about a man named Flint.” James freezes, all the heat of the fire and the wine and his grief gone in a second. _Please don’t know, not just yet, not yet._

 

“You’re Flint now, aren’t you?”

 

 _No_ , James’s mind screams, _no, I’m James McGraw, I’m yours_.

 

But he nods. There’s nothing else he can do, even though his heart is breaking. He hadn’t thought there was so much in him left that could fall apart.

 

Then he says, “Yes,” because Thomas still isn’t looking at him.

 

“I was wondering. I wasn’t sure until now. It could still have been someone else. Although that would have been too much of a coincidence, I suppose.”

 

It still could have been someone else. _How long have you been wondering? How much did you hope it_ wasn’t _me. That I hadn’t become that monster._

 

He closes his eyes again, and lets himself slump in his seat. When he presses his fingertips against his eyelids, he realises that his hand is shaking; just a bit, but it’s there, and for a moment, he’s angry at himself, _don’t show weakness_ , but then he remembers that it’s Thomas who’s there with him. Not anyone else, Thomas.

 

Tonight is like the ocean. Waves of memories, regrets, confusions, breaking over him and receding and breaking again, and at the bottom of it all he feels tired and helpless and torn. Because if there’s a way to tell Thomas everything, let him see everything, like James knows he must – if there’s a way to do that so that Thomas won’t abhor him in the end, won’t see only the monster instead of the man he once wanted, then James has to find it.

 

But this will be so very hard, and perhaps it’s impossible, and he doesn’t even want to consider that. He wants to sit in this room, with its smell of oiled wood and the sound of the fire, and the winter of the city that surrounds it, and know that Thomas is safe.

 

When he opens his eyes, Thomas is studying him, and perhaps it’s delusional of him, but that Thomas can do this without even a trace of repulsion or hardness in his gaze, soothes him and lets him hope.

 

“Did Peter reply to your letter?”

 

“He did, yes.”

 

James feels a small, unexpected pang at that. He puts it down to surprise. At some point, he thinks he had concluded that Peter never responded. That he’d turned his back and washed his hands of all of them. And Thomas might be reading his mind, because there’s a small smile on his lips that says, _Always suspecting the worst_. Not that James would have been wrong in this case, he doesn’t think.

 

Thomas says, “I know he changed. I read about the executions, and his rule in Carolina. I don’t know what happened, to make him that cold and brutal. But he was a good man when I knew him, and a loyal friend. Back then, he had as little of a choice as any of us.”

 

 _But I killed Peter_ , he thinks. _I killed him because of the choice he made and because I had a sword in my hand I needed someone to blame, just as Miranda did. Someone other than ourselves. It all went wrong because we neither of us could overlook what he’d done, we neither of us were prepared to sympathise with someone else in the face of our own loss. We should have. We owed you that much at least._ And he’ll have to tell Thomas he killed the man they both called friend once; even if Thomas might have already guessed it anyway, he’ll have to say it _._ He just can’t bring himself anymore to do it now.

 

“The last time I saw Peter,” Thomas continues, “he came to see me at Bethlem. He told me you’d gone to Paris. I wrote to him in the end because I couldn’t find any trace of either of you there. In his reply, he wrote that he’d lied because he didn’t want to make the situation worse.”

 

James snorts, a spark of anger flaring up inside him despite all. “Worse? As if the situation wasn’t of his making in the first place?”

 

Thomas smiles, but this one is brittle, and heavy. “But it wasn’t, James.” His voice is barely above a murmur, as though there’s something in all of this he can’t quite say either.

 

“He told us you were dead.”

 

For several moments, Thomas doesn’t answer, and James can read nothing in his face, his downcast eyes. He wishes he could, not least because he knows that once, he would have guessed instinctively what Thomas was thinking now. But that was a long time ago, and now he only wishes he knew what to say, or what, or how, to ask. There _is_ something Thomas isn’t saying, and from where James is sitting, it looks heavy and vast. And it could be a hundred different things.

 

Thomas shakes his head. “I know. But that was my father’s lie, not Peter’s.” He meets James’s gaze again, and there’s something very tender, and very pained, in his eyes. “I’m so very sorry that you had your lives stolen, you and Miranda, and that you had to endure so many terrible things.”

 

 _What we endured,_ James thinks. _We grieved. And we left, and I stole and killed and I failed to do the one thing for you that you asked of me. And you were alone in that place_. He wants to say, no, he wants to shout, _What I endured was knowing I did nothing! Nothing except believe a lie that should have been unbelievable to me and her both! But we just believed it!_

 

As though their grief had burrowed itself so deeply into their hearts that it felt too coherent when it became complete, for them to wonder if the story could even be true.

 

And _what if_.

_Picture it._ The last ten years, or, if the past must have its share, even just half that number. Even then Nassau might have been the same as it is now. But it would have been the three of them together, not James and Miranda alone, she with her desperate anger and he with his darkness, and wouldn’t that _have had_ to make a difference? The biggest difference in the world to them, at least.

 

 _I wish I could take you back to Nassau_ , James thinks _, and back in time to a point where I was someone you wanted._

 

“You’ll stay here?” Thomas’s voice startles him out of a reverie he hadn’t noticed himself slip into.

 

“What?”

 

Thomas laughs, the same small laugh, _Perhaps my lack of education is showing_. “Tonight,” he clarifies. “The next few days?”

 

_Ah._

_How do you still translate my speechlessness precisely right when I can’t even interpret your silence anymore?_

 

James only nods. It’s a relief, certainly. He realises only now that he never planned beyond this moment, and he knows that there’s a distance between them, one he can neither name nor describe clearly yet, and for stretches of time throughout this evening, he would have thought it just as likely that Thomas would say good-bye to him at the end of it, and vanish from his life again.

 

And so he’s infinitely grateful that it’ll only be _good night_.

 

Thomas smiles, and stands up, but then he pauses, studying James thoughtfully. Eventually, he crosses the room and picks something off a writing desk in the corner, an ornamental piece no doubt, but perhaps a repository for incoming and outgoing correspondence.

 

Thomas returns with two letters in his hand, and offers them to James. One is open and has evidently made a long journey. The other is sealed and pristine. “Read them,” Thomas says. His eyes are suddenly very tired, and the look in them strangely tremulous. “Good night, James.”

 

Just then, it feels like everything – the wine and the voyage, his fear and his joy and all his questions and answers – break and wash over him, and can it really be that _this_ is real, and perhaps not all is wrong with the world anymore?

 

Right before Thomas disappears, James recollects himself and rises too, and calls after him. Thomas stops and turns in the doorway.

 

“I’m sorry,” James says. “She didn’t—it was over before she knew what was happening. She didn’t feel anything.”

 

Thomas regards him silently for a heartbeat or two, and then he smiles and rubs his eyelids, as if what he feels was nothing worse than a little sleepiness. “I somehow always thought I’d either see neither of you again, or both. It makes little sense, doesn’t it?” He shakes his head. “You lost her every bit as much as I did. I’m sorry too.”

 

 


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I feel it's time for a huge Thank You to everyone who's commented and left kudos here. You people are the best, and you've made quite a few of my days recently!
> 
> A quick note on Season 3: The draft for this whole thing was written before the season started airing, and I’m not planning on trying to incorporate it into the fic as I edit it - so if something sounds like season 3, that’s probably coincidence, and if something doesn’t fit with it at all, this is why.

 

_Thomas,—_

_I hardly know how to begin. ‘Surprise’ is a very mild word for what I felt when I received your letter. Thomas, I wish I’d known—it is, to me, as if you’d risen from the dead, returned from some place that isn’t in this world, but of course that’s fanciful nonsense. I cannot help think it might have been better that way, though. And you say nothing, in your letter, of how, and when, you left the hospital, and what happened afterwards—and how you are. I wish I could have helped. When I parted from you that day, I promised you that I would, if ever I saw a way. I’m very sorry I never kept that promise, even if, for the most part, I broke it unknowingly._

_Why did your father tell us that lie? Not just me, and through me, them, but all of London, the whole world? What was his object—there must have been one. What was he going to do with you? He was on his way here when he was murdered, and I wonder now what he would have said, had he ever arrived. How would he have spoken of you? Would I have guessed that he was lying? Should I have guessed anyway? I wonder, most of all because once he was gone, I could have done something. Forgive me for saying it so bluntly. However well I may know you, I can’t guess how his death affected you._

_But you asked me something. I’m afraid there isn’t much I can tell you about them. I passed your father’s lie on to James and Miranda, of course. At the time, they were living in Nassau, they went there right away, the day you were taken. I told you otherwise, I know. I thought that if I told you the truth, I’d only make things harder for you, that you would be afraid for them after everything James had just told us of the pirates of New Providence. I thought it would be some consolation if you pictured them in Paris, safe, and in comfort._

_I never saw them again, and I never told them the truth about how your father could use your relationship with James against us. Miranda replied to the message I sent them; to thank me for telling them what I thought was the news of your death, and to thank me for my friendship, and for trying to help her and James after you’d been taken. If your letter had given me any reason to believe that whatever you’ve endured in the past years has made you any harder or less kind, I would tell you how much I despised myself, reading her words. But I know that if you and I were face to face now, you would remind me that there is no use in regretting our choices, and you would say, perhaps, as you did the last time I saw you, that you would have done the same thing I did, had our places been reversed. I don’t now if that’s true. If it could have been true, or if would have seen the one way out that no one else—that I—couldn’t see, as you usually do. But be it as it may, I choose to believe you. I don’t know if they’re still in Nassau. ——At first, I waited almost daily to hear from them—or of them, at least. To hear of some great change on New Providence, perhaps, or else another tragedy. But instead of any such news, more and more reports of pirate captains and their deeds and crimes came, and before long I realised that even if they were to try what we wanted to achieve—it’s too hard. I took over the government of Carolina from an officer of the Empire and I find it hard to keep law and order upright. Nassau can only be entirely impossible._

_Thomas, I wish we could have seen your plan through all those years ago. I cannot help but think that this would already be a different world, had we succeeded. I am responsible for this colony, and my people grow more afraid of the pirates every day. I can feel the rope around my hands grow tighter and tighter, and it’s abhorrent to me because the last time I felt this, I betrayed my best and truest friend. But you know people’s memories, how long they can be when by all accounts the best they could do, would be to forget. The pardons you wanted never cost me as much as they did you and Miranda and James, but they hang over my head like a sword of Damocles now, and some in Whitehall will still remind me of them and ask if I’m not too weak, or worse, too sympathetic to criminals, to defend this place and Her Majesty’s interests. It’s ridiculous, a farce, isn’t it? Or had I better call it a tragedy? Eight years ago your father forced me to betray you by assuring me that if I did, Whitehall and all of London would see me as the one who recognised the madness at last, and stopped it ere it was too late. … Now they make it clear that they were never fooled in the first place, and knew more than half of it all was lies. That they always knew I stood by you out of conviction, and suspect it wasn’t any loss of that that made me turn on you. And they use your idea against me. ‘It is a tale told by an idiot.’_

_Sometimes I despair of this place, and this task. This whole project of the New World. Sometimes I wonder how you would have done it. And I wonder what we could have done, together. No one can look at the world like you do, and— as you used to tell me, and I’ll say you were right—no one can manipulate it like I can; if the world be London, but if it isn’t, to be sure it’s the centre of it._

_I may have said much more than you wanted to hear from me, so I’ll only say one more thing: that if you choose to look for them, come here first, and let me help. I still consider you my dearest friend, and I will be yours again, if I may, and make what amends I can._

 

_Yours faithfully,_

_Peter Ashe_

 

*

 

James puts the letter on the small table by his chair, and for a while watches the patterns that the fire casts through the room, dancing and lively, as though this weren’t the dead of night, and an altogether unreal time.

 

He thinks of the shackles around his wrists, his neck, on the platform in Charlestown; the shouting crowd and all the strangers’ eyes that looked upon him with nothing but hatred; Miranda, pale and still, put on display like a puppet. And all the truths that could have changed so much, silenced yet again, locked away behind death and lies.

 

So how come, James wonders, that on the other side of it all, between the lines of writing addressed to Thomas, he recognises another Peter Ashe, the one who pored over charts and legal texts and drafts with them all those years ago; who was perhaps more level-headed at times, more realistic, more grounded than Thomas, but always just as determined and committed; and as genuine and true amidst the falseness and the selfish ambitions, someone reliable among a mass of people whose words and gestures, motives and loyalties required a nearly inhumane effort of deciphering and navigating, strategising, and caution.

 

James feels an odd kind of kinship, much against his will, with the Peter of that moment of letter-writing; and he supposes it’s because there is a whole host of demons nested in the words, and he recognises more than just a few among them as his own. The guilt and the regret and the _what_ _if,_ and the knowledge that _I was capable of doing that_.

 

And the letter does read to James like Peter is pouring his heart out to Thomas, writing down things that he hasn’t been able to say to anyone; about the past and how some of its ghosts don’t move on even when everyone they’re tied to has tried their best to set them free; and about his present, and Carolina; the reverse of the medal and realising that, no matter what they all believed with such fervour eight years earlier, that perhaps there was no right thing to do; and, before and at the end of it all, asking for forgiveness all over again.

 

It all seems like some endless expanse of thorny boscage, looking at it now from where James is standing, all those letters in hand. But back then, there were so many things they none of them could see. And every move they made, the thorns snagged at their skin and drew blood, and everything was thicket, labyrinthine and overgrown. All the while, they were closer to one another than they thought or knew, and closer to the path that would have led them out.

 

He tries to recall if Miranda ever told him about sending a message back to Peter. He doesn’t think she did—but perhaps he’s wrong. Some of that time is unclear in his memory, like something at the bottom of the sea, seen through a few feet of rippling water. He remembers coming to her with some news or other of his own, and finding her silent, and weighed down by a sadness so pure, it took him aback. By then he knew well her furious tears and her outrage, her desperation. But this was different; no sharpness or edges, no anger. Her tears were mute.

 

He took the letter she held out to him, and remembers feeling that the ground was opening up beneath him. And he remembers shouting at her though he probably meant to shout at himself, and her, for once, not shouting back, until eventually the quiet of her grief snapped, and she did. He remembers holding her for a long time, trying and failing not to let her feel his sobs, but that was much later. In between, he was alone, caught in something like a fever dream, and he let it split their pain in two.

 

And so he supposes that all the _what if_ s are, after all, meaningless. Looking back, he realises that he and Miranda were both too lost to see any way at all besides the one they took, and so was Peter.

 

And then something happened, or a hundred things did, and Peter became the very same kind of monster that James did, only on the other side of the pale. James nearly laughs. _A tale told by an idiot_.

 

He doesn’t know if this is why Thomas wanted him to read the letter; if he wanted him to remember the friend Peter once was to both of them, and not let hate be the last and only thing James will ever be able to feel for Peter anymore.

 

But he does realise one thing: that he’s only been in this city, this house—that Thomas has only been alive in his life, more than a memory, for a few hours, and already the world has become a softer place again, a place of more colours than two, a place with more capacity for good, and redemption, and understanding, than he’s been able to see for many years.

 

 _Maybe you’ll save me after all_ , he thinks.

 

The question is, of course, if Thomas wants to. _What_ Thomas wants. And James thinks that the second letter, the one that has nothing written on the outside yet, the one that has no trace of travel on it, may hold the answer to that question.

 

When he reaches out to pick it up, his hand is slow and unsure. He looks at the blank paper without doing anything else for a long time; so long, that the fire burns down to a small array of tongues of flame that struggle up intermittently from a hill of coals.

 

He sets the letter aside and puts another log on the embers. _Captain Flint, afraid of a letter._

 

His whole life is unravelling in letters these day. But then again, perhaps that’s nothing new.

 

When he’s finally read the second letter, once, twice, and then a third time, dawn is beginning to dilute the night over the rooftops of Antwerp, and the fire has gone out at last. It begins to snow.

 

He falls asleep although he fights it stubbornly, overwhelmed at last by his exhaustion. He wakes again after a few hours to the now still drifting past the windows.

 

It doesn’t let up again until long past nightfall, and James doesn’t see Thomas all day.

 

*

 

He spends the day walking through the city, ushered on by a strange desire to reconnect with a life he’d thought over, a closed-off chapter he couldn’t, nor wanted to, revisit. Unlike Miranda, he never missed London, its theatres and ballrooms, parlours and galleries. He’d missed their life; but even that meant something different to him than it did to her. He’d missed Thomas, talking to him and listening to him, feeling his breath on his skin and his lips on his own; he missed Miranda’s teasing and her clever wit, her spiritedness and the smirk at the corner of her bright red lips, well-masked as politeness and amiability, that betrayed her amusement about almost everyone around her. The day they left London, she shut all that away somewhere in her heart, like a delicate plant that needed the fertile soil of culture to flourish. While they were in Nassau, he saw it sometimes, on rare occasions, when somehow they managed to become themselves again for brief moments, in her house on some chance evening, until the taste of rum instead of wine, and the scent of frangipani instead of tulips, broke through the illusion.

 

Perhaps it was easier for him to let go of it all because he’d never felt that art and beauty, music and distinguished company, were the things that lent meaning to life. He’d gained them, and gained them by hard work and against the odds, but also by a twist of fate, and they always seemed to him more like an embellishment to, than an integral part of the things he was striving for. And once he knew he loved Thomas, he barely registered the jewels and the paintings, the food and the silverware, and the titles of the people around them anymore. He would have felt the same things in the poorest part of London as he did in one of its wealthiest houses, and he was as happy waking in his own bare, small room with Thomas next to him, as he was falling asleep beside him wrapped in velvet and silk.

 

But he also knows these things aren’t entirely separate from one another. He knows that Thomas’s ideas and ideals also came from an education and a life that could only be bought with money and status, and that they were so striking and captivating because they existed against the backdrop of privilege, shallow talk, and pretence that was London society and London politics. He knows he fell in love with Thomas because he thought and talked the way he did in spite of his upbringing. And that they were alike in that, which was, perhaps, the most unlikely thing of them all.

 

He doesn’t realise that his feet are carrying him back to the harbour until he’s there—as if the water was beckoning him to itself, taking exception to his landlocked thoughts, how they spiral away from ships and prizes, and beaches and Nassau. The Scheldt is murky and dun, like forgetting, and Nassau does feel very far away just then; like a long, complicated tale where the listening alone has drained him, and it’s relief to have come to a break in the narrative.

In the pocket of his coat, again, Thomas’s letter. The one meant for him this time, that hasn’t travelled very far at all, and there’s a very faint voice far in the back of his mind that asks, _Would it ever have?_

 

He makes it fall silent, because he knows the answer. Of course it would. If there is one thing at all that Thomas isn’t, and never could be, it’s cruel. He gave James the letter because he means what he wrote in it, still means it.

 

The perplexing, troubling thing is that, for everything else this might mean to James, it also scares him.

 

When he woke in the morning, he lay motionless for a while and searched his heart for the relief he’d felt, among the shape-shifting shadows of the dying fire in the night—the relief, the peace even, and the savage conviction that everything would right itself. That Thomas, just by his presence in his life, would give a shape to James’s past that was congruous, and _good_. And that he’d do the same for James’s future, that had come to look so bare and bleak and formless.

 

Thomas’s letter is gentle, open, and sure; and among the first words are these: _I cannot wait to see you again. Tell me where I’ll find you, and I’ll come to you_.

 

These words rolled themselves up into small bulbs of light and they still feel warm in James’s heart, but if the morning brought anything, it was the renewed clarity that Thomas doesn’t know—doesn’t know yet about the worst things, the abysses, and the marks on James’s soul that might be far too ugly, too black, and carved too deeply into it to even look at, let alone heal. And _Perhaps my job is to make certain you know what you’re getting into._

 _  
_ It’s just that his heart is a little too sore to imagine doing that. He couldn’t do it last time, not enough, how on earth is he supposed to do it now? But to hope against hope that Thomas, in giving him his letter, is telling him that whatever the past has been, it doesn’t matter, and everything can be forgiven—his heart is too sore for that, too.

 

He turns away from the river and begins to retrace his steps, blinking against the snow that is falling more densely again now, shredding everything James sees into slivers and fragments until hardly anything is left of the city.

 

*

 

“Most of them were already there. I won’t say I picked the house after the library, but it may have had some bearing on the final decision.”

 

James starts. He didn’t hear Thomas come in, lost as he was in studying the books that line the walls of the study. He wandered in here a little while ago, and it felt like some kind of habit that had transposed itself across the years, obviously caring very little that he has other concerns than the literature of the day.

 

He still feels the day in his bones, brittle and cool like the snow itself, but tonight, seeing Thomas, being reminded that he can, really, suddenly be there with him again, and smile, and speak words that aren’t half-remembered, half-imagined constructions of James’s mind—it just calms him, and settles his heart. And maybe that’s how he hears himself say, “This is almost like London, all those years ago.” He casts another glance at the books, the gold-embossed spines bearing titles in English and French, Spanish, German, and Dutch. “Except for the Dutch.” He frowns at one of them, because it’s just a jumble of letters that make little sense to him. “Any good?”

 

“You know, I can’t really tell you.” Thomas pauses, and James turns to look at him; it seems like there’s something entirely different than the surface meaning in those words, but then Thomas continues, his voice all lightness that temporarily glosses over whatever is underneath. “I read a few of them—poetry, mostly, some drama, something on the linguistics—but mainly to get a better grasp of the language. Back home, there’s someone by the name of Alexander Pope, though—,” and then he stops himself abruptly.

 

He meets James’s eyes after a moment, and gives him a smile that hovers somewhere between distraction and regret. He crosses the room to a small walnut wood table and, like the night before, pours them wine; and James quite suddenly realises that he seems terribly tired. It’s in each of his movements, as if something had turned his blood heavy as lead.

 

“I’m sorry I was out all day,” Thomas says.

 

He waits until James has accepted a glass and then moves to one of the windows. The snowflakes that drift past are becoming sparser, and the blanket of clouds that spanned the sky all day must have broken up, because the street outside is illuminated by soft, silver moonlight.

 

“You don’t have to explain yourself,” James replies, although he wishes now more than ever he knew why Thomas kept away from him until now. _What’s exhausted you so?_

Thomas smiles, but this time he doesn’t meet James’s eyes. “Did Miranda ever tell you that she and I met in the Provinces?”

 

James hesitates. He knows very little of Thomas and Miranda’s life before he met them; and after ten years that he spent with her, and apart from Thomas, he doesn’t want to admit that. He feels like he’d have to explain, make certain Thomas doesn’t misunderstand. _She wanted to talk about it, sometimes. About losing you, but just as much about being with you. But I could hardly ever bear to listen._ Something else Thomas doesn’t know, although, in some way, he must be guessing it. _There were many things she would have needed, that I couldn’t give her. I didn’t take very good care of her._

 

In the end, he only says, “No.”

 

If Thomas reads something into it, he doesn’t give any indication. He’s far away, in the same gilded past that Miranda held so dear, like a treasure in her heart.

 

“We met in Amsterdam. I was there on some business of my father’s, and she was visiting a distant relative—a great-aunt, I believe. Someone gave a ball or a dinner, and everyone was talking about Astell’s _Serious Proposal_. The first volume had just been published in London. Such outrage.” Thomas has a particular kind of amusement for narrow-mindedness. James always found it remarkable that he could laugh about it without haughtiness or contempt. He finds it all the more remarkable that he can still so now. “Henry Cavendish, whom we both knew from London, introduced us in the middle of his argument with her over the book. He expected me to side with him, of course, but you can imagine how that played out. He wasn’t the brightest fellow.” He pauses, a small smile at the corner of his mouth. “I returned to London the next day and didn’t see her again for almost a year.”

 

“But you wrote to each other. She told me that.”

 

Thomas nods. He abandons the view of the quiet, wintry street and sits down in one of the chairs arranged to make the most of the light for reading during the day. He sets his glass down on the table, just next to the two letters James left there when he came in earlier. His eyes linger on them for a moment, but then he looks away and goes on talking. “When we did meet again I realised she’d become my best friend. And I didn’t know what to do. Because we obviously couldn’t be friends, and I loved her, of course, but—” He shakes his head. “I had no idea how to explain it to her, and thought I’d have to lose her again. But of course she’d already figured it all out.”

 

 _The most unlikely thing of them all_.

 

“This may not be Amsterdam, but still. Many things here remind me of her. I needed today to say good-bye to her. Once again, for good.”

 

James nods. He takes a draught of the wine, abstractly aware that he’s drinking it too fast. It’s been such a long time since he’s drunk anything other than rum, he’s forgotten that wine has a different, quicker way of settling in his limbs, and curling its way into his head.

 

“And now?”

 

“And now,” Thomas says, slowly, almost like this is thin ice, and he isn’t sure if it’ll carry him. “I’ll come with you, if you’ll take me.”

 

 _If I’ll take you,_ James thinks. _This is all the wrong way round. Didn’t you hear the things I’ve told you?_ He turns away in a manner that Thomas can only misinterpret. But just then, he doesn’t know _where_ to turn, what to feel, or what to do.

 

The silence is stretching out too long, but every part of him is desperation and confusion and they leave him tongue-tied.

 

“I understand if you don’t want—”

 

“I killed your father.” The words are spoken before James is even aware of them. And, of course, for a heartbeat he wants to bite his tongue, wonders why on earth he said that, wishes he hadn’t. But perhaps this _is_ what it comes down to. It certainly was the beginning, in many ways. And most certainly there’s no going forward if he doesn’t say _this_ out loud, so they might just as well talk about everything else by talking about this.

 

If there is to be talking. If he hasn’t thrown everything away now.

 

James turns around, although he has to force himself to do it, and tries to brace himself; but Thomas has hardly moved, and when he eventually says, “I know,” it only sounds weary. It sounds like, _I guessed_ , and _I hoped I was wrong._

 

“Why did you do it?”

 

“Why?” James didn’t expect to be asked that; and doesn’t know what to say to it, not when it’s Thomas asking.

 

The answer is very simple. _You were gone_.

 

It’s also impossible. He feels like there is no answer he can give that will stop Thomas from slipping through his fingers again. At the end of the day, he didn’t care what he did, what crime he committed; it didn’t matter because Thomas would never learn of any of his deeds anymore, and the only other person in the world he cared about, had told him in all but words that she wanted it; that she wanted her husband’s death, and their lives, revenged. None of this can be a good enough reason, because nothing can be a good enough reason, to someone who holds life sacred.

 

“I thought you were dead and he was responsible.”

 

Thomas says nothing. After a long while, he closes his eyes briefly, and nods.

 

And perhaps it’s the silence alone, or perhaps it’s that James can’t interpret it, a feeling like drowning, that makes his mind scream, _Say something!_ , and something in him snaps entirely in two.

 

“Do you have any idea what it did to me, imagining you in that place?” He’s all but yelling, and he wishes he could lower his voice, control himself, chose the words cautiously, but this isn’t reason talking, it’s all his heart and his soul, and they’re bursting. “Do you know how it felt, thinking of you alone and in pain, and believing that no one in the whole world cared enough to do something? We thought you’d taken your own life, Thomas—that it was so terrible that you could see no other way, _you_ , who could always see a way.”

 

And then the storm dies down, and he stops.

 

Thomas is completely still, and if his wordlessness was indecipherable before, it’s like a wall now. There’s an unsurmountable disconnect between them in this moment.

 

 _Oh god, I’m so sorry. But won’t you understand? Won’t you forgive me?_ “Weren’t you angry?” he asks, voice soft and quiet again, and just a bit desperate.

 

At least Thomas reacts to this again. He closes his eyes for a moment, and shakes his head. “Of course I was angry. When I realised that he meant it, and wasn’t just trying to scare me. I kept thinking that it would all be over in a few months, and I could fix things somehow. Find you and Miranda, and leave it all behind. Until he came to see me, long after Peter, weeks and weeks later. And he _saw_ me, and the things they did in that place, and he did nothing. Even at the start, there would have been so many other ways that he could have silenced me, but he chose that one. So I can only assume that he wanted all those things done to me, and it kept happening for no better reason than that he was powerful enough to make it so. I was so furious, I couldn’t think clearly.”

 

Now it’s James who can’t move. He wasn’t prepared for hearing Thomas mention Bethlem, hearing him acknowledge, confirm that it was the horrid place for him, too, that it was reported to be. He realises that he’d let himself believe—pacified by Thomas’s manner that seems so little changed, by how he seems changed in no other ways than ten years can account for—that perhaps it was different for him after all; less painful, less depriving, less torturous.

 

It wasn’t.

 

James is struggling to find words to say to this, but Thomas isn’t looking at him, and his thoughts have already quitted that dark place of his past again. He goes on, “But James, if I had listened to Miranda, we might all have got away. If I hadn’t allowed the effect I had on you to draw you in until all your good judgement was gone, _you_ might at least have listened to her.” He meets James’s gaze then, his eyes pained, and open, and vulnerable, like he’s offering something up. “My father didn’t destroy our lives, James. I did.”

 

 _No._ “What?” He can’t manage anything more eloquent than that, but it hardly seems to matter. Thomas isn’t hearing him just then. He smiles, faintly, wistfully. “Think about the life we had. It was so perfect, sometimes it seems like an impossibility now, like it can’t have been real at all. But it was. And I threw it all away for some idealistic principle that had nothing to do with us. Just people an ocean away.”

 

James doesn’t know what to say for a moment or two. Some of Thomas’s responses of the previous night, and this evening, are suddenly making a very different kind of sense, and can’t honestly say he expected things to suddenly appear to him in this particular mix of light and shade. He wants to say so many things, he doesn’t know where to start. So he lets his heart decide.

 

“You didn’t draw me in. I believed in you.”

 

“So I should have taken better care.”

 

James finally decides it’s time to sit down. The room seems to be tilting a little, and he curses both his tiredness and the wine. He rests his elbows on his knees and leans in. “Do you remember when I returned from Nassau, after that first time I went to seek out the governor? And Miranda tried to talk sense into me because it was clear to her that the whole thing was doomed to fail, and she thought you’d refuse to see it?”

 

Thomas only nods. His face is stony again, lips pressed together, like he’s hoping with bated breath that the memories won’t come too close, won’t find him if he keeps very still.

 

“I didn’t listen to her then because I didn’t see it either. I believed you were right. I still believe it.” He pauses, and takes a breath. “And if you really want to come with me, I’ll show you that you are.”

 

Finally, Thomas smiles, and his eyes looks suspiciously bright all of a sudden. He sinks back in his chair, like the conversation has wholly drained him, too. His gaze is very tender when he looks at James, but he doesn’t say anything.

 

So James prompts, because for God’s sake, his heart is too confused for his mind to deduce the answer from everything they’ve said and not said tonight. “Are you coming with me?”

 

Thomas regards him silently for another moment, then nods towards the letters on the table, the one addressed to James on top. “I thought I made that clear already.”

 

Now it’s James who can’t help a laugh, brittle and breathless though it is. “You wrote that when you didn’t know … who you were writing to.”

 

“Captain Flint? Well, I do now.”

 

This is when James goes with his first impulse, and reaches across the space between them, falling to his knees on the floor and pulling Thomas into a tight embrace, one that feels terribly, terribly overdue. He quite overwhelms himself, and just about manages to hold down a sob.

 

If Thomas tenses and doesn’t respond for a split-second, James chooses to ignore that, and focus on how it feels when Thomas does relax, and allow his body to lean into James’s.

 

James also ignores that Thomas gently disentangles himself again far too soon for his liking, and instead focuses on his smile, and the proximity that remains between them.

 

“I’ll need a few days to put things in order here.”

 

A thought that James finds mildly sobering. He nods, but as he reluctantly lets go of Thomas again for good, he asks, “You’re just going to leave all of this behind?”

 

“Leave what behind?” Thomas returns, following James’s gaze around the room, as though there mustn’t be a whole story of struggle and strife in the walls of this splendid house, and comfort and quiet of this life. “We can take the books if you want.”

 

James laughs, a very strong sense of relief finally settling in his chest. _We’ll be fine_ , he thinks, and violently silences the suspicious voice in the back of his head that asks, _Are you sure?_

 

“Well, I’ve been stealing mine, so that would be a nice change.”

 

On the other side of the closed door, a bell rings. Thomas rises, and gestures to invite James to follow him. “You can tell me about Nassau over dinner.”

 

James hesitates, and then nods, slowly. _So many monsters in Nassau_.

 

And Thomas might be reading his mind because he says, “Just tell me.”

 

“All right.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This was meant to be longer, and there will be a second part to the chapter, but since it's been approximately half an eternity since my last update, I've decided to split the whole thing in two for the time being anyway.
> 
> Also, I have to go back on what I said last time - I may be taking bits of season 3 into this after all, plus I figured it might be interesting to see Thomas react to / interact with Rogers at some point. But we'll see.
> 
> Hope you guys enjoy!!

The night is balmy and close, saturated with the heat of the past day so that it seems to almost have substance, a texture like some heavy, dense fabric. It has barely grown cooler since the sun set hours and hours ago, or at least Thomas doesn’t think that it has. His skin is a bit too warm even to his own touch, though, so he may be wrong about this.

 

He closes his eyes and tries to let the recentness of everything—the quality of the air, and the smell of the tropical flora and of pine wood, the sounds of the island’s nocturnal creatures that go about their business beyond and above the town, this way of being by himself—he tries to let it sink as deep as it can go into his mind, and anchor him to this place that’s thousands of miles and half a decade away from London.

 

Most of the time, it’s enough; far enough, different enough. Just not always.

 

The town is quiet and sleepy, breathing slowly. At the end of the street, where it opens out into the beach, a faint glow indicates fires still burning, and voices, a scattered melody, and the dull thumps and shouts of some work, drift up along the lines of houses like idle, thin spirits. The tavern, though, is nearly empty, conversations are murmured, and laughter muffled.

 

When Thomas came here earlier, he did so hoping he’d fine something like this—a few hours balanced between life and calm, just real and unobtrusive enough for his fraying mind to knit itself back together again. Some nights, the drinking and the gambling, the revelling and the fighting never stop, but go on without pause and, by some alchemy and at an unclear point in time, morph themselves into Nassau’s daytime business. Not this night, though, thankfully, and so he’d found a bottle of rum and this corner on the porch where the shadows overlap and would hide him from any familiar eyes that might happen by.

 

But John Silver, of course, is like a compass needle, and so here he is, materialised out of the darkness like some phantom, though announced unmistakeably by the knock-tap of his step on the wood-boards.

 

Thomas looks up at him, not so much startled out of his thoughts by John’s voice than dragged a little closer to the surface of them, but he manages a smile.

 

“Good evening,” John says; his voice the kind of murmur that involuntarily moulds itself to fit its surroundings.

 

“Good morning, Mr. Silver.”

 

John leans on the weathered, creaking banister that skirts the porch and surveys the empty street. He seems relieved to be standing still, to be able to take the weight off his left leg. “Well yes,” he says, “I suppose you could look at it that way.”

 

He turns back to Thomas, regarding him for a moment with some deliberation; then he gestures towards the empty chair by the table. “May I?”

 

Thomas doesn’t mind his company. Quite the contrary, really. John has a quick mind and a sharp wit that makes conversing with him easy. In some ways, it’s much like it used to be with Miranda, with James. But unlike James, John isn’t cautious about what he says, or how, or which parts of this, their world he talks about and calls by their real names. It’s unencumbered and refreshing and Thomas enjoys it because he’d missed that more than he’d realised.

 

Only tonight isn’t really a time for any company at all; and however discerning John may usually be, however finely tuned his perception is, he doesn’t pick up on that now.

 

Although, perhaps the shadows are to blame. Or some purpose.

 

Thomas pushes the bottle of rum across the table and says, “Please.”

 

John, once he’s taken his seat, picks the bottle up with a nod of thanks and takes a deep drink, like he wants to quench his thirst with the stuff. Thomas isn’t quite sure yet how the people here treat it like it’s water, or ale at best, but he supposes that this, like some other things, is just a matter of time. He’s getting used to it, at any rate. It’s crude and it burns, but in many ways, that seems to befit this place, and so he likes its bite and its warmth, and hasn’t missed the wines and the Spanish liqueurs of the past.

 

In truth, he misses very few things.

 

“I’ve just come up from the beach,” John says as he sets the bottle down on the table again. He begins to rub circles into his left thigh, close to the knee, but the movement already seems absent-minded after only a few moments. If the rum does one thing well, it’s to take the edge off things quickly. “It’s busy for this time of night. Half the crew’s down there, I think. I wonder what’s keeping everyone out of everyone’s beds. And out of this place, for that matter.”

 

He pauses, as if contemplating the puzzle. “Must be the full moon.”

 

Thomas looks up past the outline of the roof and the unmoving palm fronds, to where he can just see the moon, a piece of bone in the black sky, pale and oval; and waning, if he remembers right. “Must be.”

 

John says, “Flint’s down there as well.”

 

“He went some time ago, yes.”

 

“He seems eager to get the work finished up.” Another pause, with a sense of hesitation to it. “You wouldn’t know where we’ll be headed, once that storm,” John gestures heavenwards, “breaks and brings us the wind back. Would you?”

 

Thomas tries to listen to the island, the sea beyond the town; he breathes in the sweetness and the tranquillity of the night, and wonders what in the air tells John that a storm is coming. And he wonders, too, if it will help, or make things worse, or do nothing at all.

 

“No, he hasn’t mentioned it to me.”

 

John sighs. “Well, I suppose he’ll let us know when he wants to let us know.” He takes the bottle again and drinks, and rubs a hand across his eyes. For a moment or two, he stares off into the darkness, then he shakes his head. “It’s just that the crew are wondering, and I’m their quartermaster, so I should know where we’re going and what we’re meant to do there.” He cards his fingers through is hair and upsets the tight ponytail he habitually wears. Briefly, he’s occupied in trying to put the strands back in place, until he gives up and undoes the tie altogether, with a little more force that would probably have been necessary. “It’s just so damned hard to get anything out of him sometimes.”

 

He sounds so long-suffering, it makes Thomas laugh. But he wonders, _Is it?_ The James he knew was open, frank, and honest to a fault. _There are ten years, and worlds of things none of us ever imagined, between him and me_.

 

“But I suppose I shouldn’t be asking you about these things. I apologise.”

 

Thomas knows that John has questions he needs answered; they’re like shells on strings that John has been trailing about with him ever since they first met. Thomas knows, too, that John meant to ask about the Walrus’s next mission, about the Captain’s next plan. But he’s also asking about James. He is always also asking about James.

 

Across the street, a stray dog emerges from an alley and chases a scent about for a while. He looks like a little ghost to Thomas, grey and indistinct in the dark, and all quiet sounds of dust and breathing.

 

Thomas can feel his mind bleed away into the movements of the animal, its odd nocturnal translucence, and the realness of it that diminishes by the heartbeat. Even the heat is becoming imprecise again, as it will do at intervals; a chill settles on his skin.

 

He blinks, and drains half his glass, and tries to focus on the sharpness of the alcohol, to let it pull him back into himself and remind him what is real. It isn’t working well.

 

“I know you think that I know him inside out,” he says. “But you’re mistaken. I really don’t.”

 

John has leaned forward, sitting with one elbow propped on his good leg, and the string of leather he uses to tie his hair still in his hands. His fingers are twirling and looping it around endlessly, tying and undoing an encyclopaedia of knots. ~~~~

 

Now he looks over his shoulder at Thomas, and studies him thoughtfully, perhaps for a bit longer than is strictly acceptable. Thomas keeps watching the street, and pretends to be unaware. He can tell there’s something between John Silver and James, a kind of closeness; fraught and complex, perhaps, but significant. Thomas doesn’t know enough about their history to be able to interpret the breadth and depth of it, but if this is a matter of fact to him, the same thing can only be a matter of some concern to John.

 

“You want me to tell you the whole story, so you can make better sense of him,” Thomas says eventually. “But it isn’t mine to tell, not here. I don’t think.” He meets John’s gaze and smiles. “So you’ll have to get it from him, or not at all, I’m afraid.”

 

The corner of John’s curls up into a wry smile, and he may have a reply ready on his lips; but he hesitates, and then he lets them both dissolve into the quiet night. Whatever was running through is mind, it finally turns only into a small, curious headshake.

 

The issue with Thomas, John has found, is that he can’t distrust him. No matter how hard he’s trying to stay on his guard against someone who holds so evident a spell over Flint, he just keeps failing.

 

He knows where it comes from. Words have been John’s familiars since childhood, trusted companions that he’s relied on for protection, to be his weapons, and his keys, for as long as he can remember. He knows their workings and their ins and outs better than he knows his own mind or the constellations, and so it didn’t take him long to realise that Thomas understands them, and could manipulate them, just as well.

 

Only John doesn’t think that that’s what he does. There’s plenty that Thomas doesn’t say, and his silences have tangled roots and meanings and a heavy weight. But his words have no agendas and if Flint makes war with his words and John lays traps, Thomas creates things, and just leaves them there. It may be the purest thing John has ever witnessed and he’s drawn to it like a moth to the flame.

 

“You know,” John says, “I thought—when this all started, I thought it’d go wrong.” He waves his hand in Thomas’s direction to make clear to him what he means by _this_. “He takes off, without any explanation, and tells me he’ll be back in a few months. Do you know how much can change here, in a few months?” He pauses, and shakes his head again. “Measure it in loyalties, and absolutely everything changes three times over in that much time. And still, even after everything he already put the crew through, he asks for that kind of confidence. Some days I still can’t believe it worked. And then, when he returns, he’s a different man.”

 

_And he brings_ you. _After all the scheming and the betrayals and the persuasions and the mystic rumours, he brings someone who could, evidently, do some damage in this place if he so chose, by the power he has over Flint, if nothing else._

 

It was as if some very hard, very old shell that had been encasing Flint just underneath the skin, had suddenly become cracked, and something none of them had ever seen, became visible through the fissures. And the hard, cruel edge that Charlestown had left them with, was sanded off again. John wasn’t, and still isn’t, sure whether to be relieved about that, or worried. He doesn’t know where it might lead.

 

That Thomas is the missing piece that could resolve the whole puzzle into coherence, if only one knew where exactly to put it, John understood clearly the first time he watched Flint with him, as they were standing together at the bow of the Walrus; the sun setting on the other side of a benevolent expanse of ocean, John’s world in a whirlwind of questions, and Flint’s made, visibly, of that precise moment and nothing else.

 

“Do you think,” John asks, “that he understands the hold he has on the people here, on the ship and this town alike, so well, in such a nuanced way, that he could be reasonably certain it’d play out like this? That we’d take it in stride and be … swept up in whatever it is that’s going on here?”

 

Somewhere far off to the north, thunder clatters through the night; from here, it still sounds like brushstroke more than a gathering storm, but it’s the first clear indication that John’s prediction may hold true, and the heat is about to break.

 

And Thomas thinks, _No. I don’t think that’s how it was at all. I don’t think he considered any of that when he boarded that ship to Antwerp, or when he asked me if I meant it when I wrote I wanted to come here._ And for a moment, the weight of that hits him again, like it does sometimes. A decade from here in London, like a pearl in a shell, there are a few months, just a bit more than half a year, that were perfect, luminous, smooth. And it was a breathless rush, too brief in every way, certainly brief for Thomas to be sure of anything but his own heart. He didn’t know then that James loved him that much. He didn’t know in Antwerp, and he didn’t know until the past ten years of James’s life began to take shape through the things he told Thomas, and the things Thomas began to see.

 

“What do you think is going on?”

 

There’s another crash of thunder, already closer, John fancies. “I have no fucking idea,” he mutters. He supposes it was a rhetorical question, anyway. Probably not even Flint knows what’s going anymore. Again, John shakes his head.

 

“Mrs. Barlow’s husband. That’s all he’s ever told us about you. Do you know that?”

 

“I know that, yes.”

 

“So that’s true?”

 

Thomas laughs, as if he finds that question, out of all of them, droll. But when he answers there’s a softness to his voice that bespeaks a very different sentiment. “That’s true, yes.”

 

“Then why was she here with him?” John asks, because here they are, arrived without detour at the next riddle, and there has to be _some_ thread he can pull on and not be met with just another knot, somewhere. “Where were you all that time?”

 

The rumours have made the rounds by now, of course; the story that in other parts of the world appears to have been common currency for years, about Mrs. Barlow and her husband and her lover. But it’s so well-traded that some of the truth must have been lost in the string of Chinese whispers that brought the story to New Providence in the end; but John supposes there’s something to be said for the proverbial kernel of truth, only that really only makes less sense out of everything, instead or more.

 

With the next peal of thunder, a gust of cool wind brushes along the street, and dives under the eaves. Thomas has been slowly nudging his glass along in a circle around its own axis on the table, but now he stops and looks up at the sky. The moon has turned blurry all of a sudden, shrouded in a wisp of cloud.

 

Thomas picks up his glass and drains it. He looks every bit as tired as John is by now feeling.

 

“Tell me one thing. Did Flint bring you here, or did you want to come?”

 

Thomas gives him a look, like he isn’t quite sure why John would want to know that, in particular. “I wanted to be here.”

 

“Because of her?”

 

For just another moment, Thomas holds his gaze, but then he turns away and is silent for a long time before he finally answers, “No.” His voice is very quiet, and very soft.

 

“Sorry,” John says, almost as quietly. Whatever the story is, it’s evident that Miranda Barlow’s death causes Thomas pain. John lets a few beats of silence pass. “You’re not holding this against me, are you?

 

Thomas doesn’t look at him now, but neither does he seem angry; only somewhat absent, perhaps. “No. You may ask me anything you wish, Mr. Silver.”

 

_Apparently._ John is fairly certain that if he were talking to someone else, some of his questions would have gotten him a punch or at least a hearty _fuck you_ by now. “I just might not get an answer?”

 

“That’s a possibility. I hope you’re not holding that against me?”

 

John laughs. “Oh, I’m trying my best to hold it against you, believe me.” As if the world were taking a deep breath, the wind begins to grow more steady around them. Still just a faint rustling in the palm trees and the shrubs, but sure of itself. “You’d think that with time, the mysteries would get fewer. They’re just piling up.”

 

“Mr. Silver,” Thomas says, and then hesitates, as though the thought has slipped away from him momentarily. “I apologise. Can we continue this another time?”

 

“You weren’t looking for company at all tonight, were you?”

 

Thomas smiles and shakes his head. “No, I wasn’t.” 

 

“Well, you certainly have a polite way of telling people to bugger off.” John rises, and turns to face Thomas once more. He can’t be sure, but it’s a bit as though Thomas has already forgotten that he’s there. He pauses. “Are you all right?”

 

Thomas’s eyes flick up at him, a little curious at the question. “I’m fine. How’s your leg?”

 

John laughs, and nods. “It’s fine. Good morning, Mr. Barlow.”

 


	5. Chapter 5

_There is a tide_ , he reads _, in the affairs of men_ , and then the wind has turned the page and he’s looking away again, anyway.

 

            His attention catches for a moment on the other books scattered about the room, like dislodged leaves blown in by the gale, because Thomas doesn’t usually do this. His mind doesn’t pick up things and then leave them, open on their spines or turned on their bellies, not to be returned to, just abandoned haphazardly.

            Then again, it’s gone on to the time of night when everything is somehow different; too late to be properly awake, and too early for it too. Although he’s been awake at such hours, with Thomas; not properly, but blissfully, and he has to make an effort now to push the memories back, deeper into his heart.

 

            The exercise is hardly made easier by the way Thomas is stretched out in the wicker chair by the French window, only in breeches, and the sleeves of his shirt rolled up, every line of his body long and smooth and heavy. James crosses the room slowly, quietly, not quite sure what he’s afraid of disturbing. He pulls up a second chair and follows Thomas’s gaze, just to be looking at something other than him.

 

            The shutters on the window are thrown open to the balcony, and the tempest beyond, the forest a chaos of deep-ocean greens and pitch black, and flighty specks of gold where the light from inside the room bounces off the drenched foliage in leaps and bounds. Thomas seems entirely lost in it, watching through half-closed eyes like he finds the chaos as soothing as a homely fire. When James sits beside him, he lightly inclines his head towards him, but for some long moments that remains the only indication he gives of even having registered James’s presence.

 

The quiet and the warmth of the house, soft and fragrant with the smell of warmed wood, wrap around James like a blanket. It’s comforting, after the furious wind and the pelting rain, but it’s also too soft for comfort. And James feels rough in the midst of it, like grainy wood and sand; his hands burn from hours of gripping rope and letting it slip through them too fast, and in a few mores hours the skin will be cracked and calloused. His throat burns from shouting, and his heart is chafed already from the purpose of the night’s work.

 

            He never used to be so conscious of these things, all the times he stepped through Miranda’s door, with new bruises or new cuts and new sins. It didn’t matter, because that roughness used to be hers, too; that hers didn’t show on her skin, that her fury and her despair didn’t manifest in deeds, never seemed to be of any consequence. It was enough to know that she had a darkness too, to make them equals in this.

 

            But with Thomas, it’s different, of course it is. Everything always has been. With Thomas, he wants his hands to be gentle and his voice to be soft and his stories to be spun of finer thread. Raw silk, perhaps. Certainly not the coarse salt-and-blood-crusted stuff he has woven himself into, and can’t undo.

 

“You’re soaked,” Thomas says into his thoughts. His voice is low, but James still just about keeps himself from jumping, and he breathes out in a laugh.

 

            “Yes…,” he says, and rolls his shoulders experimentally. A shiver crawls over his damp skin. “It seemed like a good idea half an hour ago.” He pushes his damp hair back from his forehead and, for just a moment or two (he isn’t buying time), considers the gradient of rainwater that is slowly bleeding across the threshold of the balcony.

 

            The roof is fending off the worst of the downpour. But it really is no weather for open shutters.

 

            He looks up at last, and realises that Thomas is still watching him; with the smile on his lips that he has when he’s tired, and there’s no one else around. Quite unguarded, tender, and a little wry. James can’t help return it.    

           

            “Did the storm wake you?” he asks, because now that he lets himself look closely, he notices how exhausted Thomas looks, as though he, too, had been toiling at something all night.

 

            Thomas shakes his head. “No …” He shifts to sit up a bit straighter in his chair, as if to somehow peel himself out of his tiredness, and then casts a glance about the room, looking for a moment like someone who’s forgotten something, and is searching for a hint to help recover the memory. But then his eyes fall on James again and the expression is gone. “The heat kept me up.” Another smile, but in this one, something is slipping away, missing.

 

            Thomas is a terrible liar.

 

            Which may be why he looks away, back at the turbulent night outside, almost immediately.

 

            Thunder rolls above, loud enough to be almost palpable now that the island is in the midst of it. As it subsided slowly, like an avalanche coming to a cumbersome halt, the wind dives below the roof and reaches inside the room, as it will do intermittently, like a furtive caress. It covers James’s whole body in goosebumps all over, but Thomas closes his eyes, like he finds the cool and the humid smell of the rain and the forest soil pleasant.

 

            In the amalgamation of darkness and lamplight here at the edge of the room, Thomas’s skin seems less pale than it really is, even after more than half a year in these latitudes. And if he’s honest, James hopes that even another decade or two wouldn’t do anything to change that, because one thing he found out quickly as their relationship became intimate all those years ago, was that Thomas blushes easily, and often, and deliciously. In certain situations.

 

            James closes his eyes also, and rubs his sore eyelids with his fingertips until he sees bright spots. A laugh flutters in his chest, a jittery thing that almost manages to escape before he can swallow it.

 

            Apparently, his mind is too tired tonight to pull itself together.

 

            “Your quartermaster came to talk to me earlier, down at the tavern,” Thomas says. “He’s wondering where you’ll be going.”

 

            It’s said lightly, and without any implication, and it’s entirely enough to pull James’s mind together for him. He sighs, and reflexively begins to comb his fingers through his hair again. If he’s learned one thing in recent months, it’s that this is his tell for every variation of discomfort. He isn’t sure if he should be glad or unsettled by the fact that he very obviously never was discomfited enough in all of his dealings of the past decade, to have given that away; but that he keeps doing it around Thomas, the one person whose presence comforts his soul.

 

            He laughs, but this time it takes effort, and it comes out sounding brittle as dry leaves even in his own ears. “Only that?”

 

            Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Thomas incline his head to the side. “Amongst other things.” He pauses, then he asks, “You’re leaving in the morning?”

 

            Without thinking, James bends down and picks up a book that has somehow found its way to the floor (Thomas never does this), and runs his thumbs along its outline; the spine, welted with ridges, and the softer edge of the pages. He lets far too much time pass before he answers. But finally, he nods.

 

            “As soon as the storm clears. But it’s already getting lighter in the north. I think we’ll be able to sail at dawn.” He pauses, and vaguely realises that he’s yet take in the letters embossed on the cover of the book.     “Robert Lowther hanged three men in his port last month. I swore I wouldn’t let any execution of a pirate go unavenged, so I can’t let it stand. Certainly not now.” He says it quietly, as though that might wear away some of the implications of the words. “I haven’t told them yet because—” He stalls.

 

            “Because you didn’t want me to know?” Thomas supplies mildly.

           

            _Yes._ “No. I do. I want you to know.” _I need you to know_. He thinks of Antwerp, the week they spent there before they boarded a ship to the West Indies; the evenings. He did tell Thomas about Nassau that night over dinner, and most nights afterwards. New Providence, the Caribbean; the crew and the townspeople, everything and all, but this, _this_. This he skipped over.

 

            Not on purpose, he assured himself, but in the way the foot slips on ice and chooses surer purchase instead, instinctively and naturally. He told himself lies in the telling; chimerical things that stood with their true faces before him every moment that he was alone during the hours of nighttime, but he carried on with it anyway. All the while knowing that it’d have to stop eventually. Not even so much because things would present themselves sooner or later anyway, with their true faces, whether or not James wanted it or did anything towards it. But because he and Thomas began in perfect frankness with each other, and he knows that when all is said and done, that’s the only way they can be, or want to be.

So he wonders if, and sometimes fears, and sometimes knows that, the distance between them is half made of his evasions and his own silence, next to Thomas’s. But then there’s who he was when he first fell in love with Thomas, his truest self, and there’s _this_ true self.

 

            “I want you to know,” he says again. “That doesn’t mean I find it easy to tell you these things. So I’ve been putting it off.”

 

            Gently, he lets the book slip back onto the floor. Thomas is still and quiet beside him for some long moments, lightning, two, three heartbeats, the peal of thunder. Then he says, “Barbados,” as though that was the most relevant information that James’s words conveyed. “How far is it?”

 

            As though none of it was complicated. And this is how it’s been, almost since the very first day in Antwerp. Thomas has been making the evasions and the silences so easy, it’s been bittersweet.

 

            _You keep making it so easy and I don’t know why, because it really isn’t._

_Is it?_

 

            “Five days,” he says, and it’s just facts and so it rolls off his tongue just as easily, “if the wind doesn’t flag again. Perhaps six, each way.” _In between, one day to scout, the first hour after nightfall to find the man we mean to kill, and kill him. And everyone else we have to_. _Some time to gather what we find useful or valuable while the town cowers in fear. Five or six days back._ “It should take less than two weeks.” He wishes he had the courage to say all these things openly, and clearly, word for word. And not look somewhere else when he does. Although he supposes something would already be gained if he could look at Thomas even now, skirting around things.

 

            There must be something in Thomas’s eyes in the first moments after he hears these things, something other than the shades of kindness and nothingness that James sees every time he does manage to look at him again.

 

            Even if it were disgust or, God forbid, fear, James would want to know. It would be better than wondering. But he’s a coward in this.

           

            A coward, but a reckless one, and on occasion, he’s lately found, a desperate one as well. And so he’s asked, “Do you mind?” before he can catch the words and continue to talk about distance and time and favourable winds instead.

 

            “Mind what? That every time you leave, there’s a chance you won’t return?”

 

            “That every time I leave …,” James presses his thumb into the palm of his other hand, where a dull pain is beginning to throb, “I return with more blood on my hands.”

 

            He feels Thomas’s gaze on him, and he feels something, _something. Now,_ he thinks, _if you could just look at him, you might find out what it is._ “Yes,” Thomas says. The word weighted with audible care, like something disconcerting proffered at a safe distance. “I mind. Of course.” James finally looks at him, and his throat goes tight because Thomas is watching him with those same soft eyes that made James believe nothing would ever be wanting in their lives, ten years ago. “As you evidently do.”

 

            Surely this would be the moment to talk of all _those things_. The moment James keeps promising himself is all that he’s waiting for. Thomas turns his head toward the window again, as if their conversation had been as casual in content as it was in tone, and his mind had already moved on to something else.

 

            Outside, the rain stops as consummately and entirely as it came. Thomas breathes a quiet laugh in response to this suddenness of nature, and quite suddenly stands up. And with that the moment is, of course, past.

 

            Thomas steps out onto the balcony, and James traces his bare feet on the rain-sprayed wood, the wind tugging on the loose fabric of his shirt. He leans on the banister, and James’s eyes guess the curve of his back beneath his shirt. He silently curses himself for having allowed the moment to slip away.

 

            There was a time, the first few weeks perhaps, when he told himself that this was fine. Enough. To know that Thomas was alive, and well, even with the past so dark a presence. To be able to see him, talk to him, spend time beside him. But that was when his relief and his joy were so blinding, they blotted out the coil of want and longing buried inside him, and the desire to turn back the clock, in which ever way possible.

 

            He rises too, slowly, and goes to stand next to Thomas. The forest is a concert of rainwater pattering downwards from leaf to leaf, and drumming dully on the ground. “I keep waiting for you to say that you want to go back.”

 

            Thomas looks at him, surprised. “Back? Where to, Antwerp?”

 

            James shrugs. “Antwerp, the Continent. The American colonies.” _Boston,_ Miranda says in his memory. _There’s music there._ “Anywhere. The civilised world.”

 

            “The civilised world,” Thomas echoes. He says it like it’s a concept he’s only encountering just now. Novel and quite outlandish. “Why would you think that?”

 

_Because what would you see here that’s worth—anything?_

James leans on his forearms and lets the rain tickling in broken rivulets off the roof tiles, splash on his sore hands. It’s so cool against his burning skin, it almost hurts.

 

            “The first time I came here,” he begins slowly, “when I was supposed to win the governor as our ally, I returned and I told you I believed you’d been right about this place. That it could be made into something good. Something stable, healthy, prosperous. I’ve spent ten years trying to prove it. That you _were_ right. That we were right and that even if it cost us too much, it was worth _something._ ” He pauses to take a breath, and turns his hands around, not quite sure why. The water starts to pool in his palms until he flattens them enough to let it escape. “There are good people here. But they’re just good people. This island is made of betrayal and violence and exploitation and … And I haven’t been able to do anything at all about it.” He thinks on it for a moment, and a bitter laugh breaks free. “In fact, I’ve compounded it, if anything.”

 

            He stops, and squeezes his eyes shut, and pinches the bridge of his nose. When he peers up at Thomas, he looks unsure, undecided perhaps, about what to say to this.

 

 _Well_ , James thinks. _What can you say?_ The most concise answer would be, _Yes._

            He can tell Thomas has words on the tip of his tongue, he saw it often enough in London. The way he purses his lips almost into a pout, when he has an answer he doesn’t want to speak out loud just yet.

 

            But a moment later Thomas has somehow brushed the doubt away and has raised an eyebrow at James.

 

            “And you think I was expecting Tunbridge Wells, just with palm trees?”

 

            It’s absurd enough, and said with enough teasing, that it makes James really laugh. “No. No, not that.” He shakes his head, and, more soberly, adds, “I’m just having trouble imagining what this place looks like to you. And the people here.”

 

            Thomas considers him with his unreadable eyes, and then turns away again. For a moment, he seems so lost in the variations of black that is the outside world, that he might just as well have forgotten all about their conversation. But eventually, he says, “There’s a conversation we had, that has come back to me many times over the years. Something you said, that day at Wapping. Do you remember?”

 

            James nods. Of course he remembers. Every moment.

 

            This was so early on. When he knew nothing yet. _A man trying to change the world._

 

            “ _Civilisation needs its monsters_.” Thomas says, and smiles. “It was so clear to both of us, who belonged on which side of that phrase. Wasn’t it?”

 

 _Yes. It was_.

 

            “Would you laugh at me if I told you I tried to find out who he was, the man that hanged that day?” He looks at James with a kind of self-deprecating amusement. But then he nods, and grows more serious. “His name was Henry Coughan. That was easy enough to learn, but of course it was also all I could discover.” He shrugs. “The day he was killed, I didn’t know his name and I had no idea who he was. Where he’d come from, what for he’d done the things he’d done. If perhaps he had reasons that might have been good enough, all considered. But I did know the people who hanged him. Who made the laws, who pronounced him unworthy of sympathy.” He squints at the night, and something in it that isn’t really there. “Perhaps he deserved none, perhaps he was evil. But how many people are that?” The pause is long enough that James begins to wonder if there’s an answer to the question. A number, or names.

           

            “Civilisation needs its monsters,” Thomas repeats once more. His voice is level, and his words have something very sure about them that James can’t quite make sense of. “I’ve come to find it very difficult to tell the two apart. But my suspicion is that _in the civilised world_ , the monsters have long had the upper hand.” He smiles at James, and his next words are as soft. “So I’d rather be here. And besides, I can’t really stand the cold anymore.”

 

            And very suddenly, he looks away. It seems like a very conscious, but oddly startled movement. Like he’s unintentionally invoked something and he’s sure James would see it on his face.

 

            Whatever it was, it’s gone some moments later, when he pushes himself away from the banister and turns fully to James. The thunder is far off now, and the forest is going quiet.

 

            “Don’t get hurt,” Thomas says. “And get some rest before you go.”

 

            Then he’s gone, and James is sure he won’t get any rest, because all he wants to do is take Thomas in his arms and fall asleep like that, and wake up long past dawn.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As always, the hugest thank you to everyone who keeps reading this despite my inability to post at anything close to acceptable frequency. I can't quite believe I'm still getting kudos and comments, and I love everyone who gives either to death, honestly.
> 
> This one is a little bit outside my comfort zone because there are Other Characters in it, whom I enjoyed writing tremendously, but to whom I undoubtedly haven't done justice. I hope the fact won't feel derailing to you guys (or, for that matter, the fact that I managed to make the indents stick in the previous chapters, but apparently not anymore).
> 
> Enjoy!?

When James returns thirteen days later, he does have more blood on his hands, more still than he’d reckoned with the morning he set sail. The streets of Nassau are filling up with dusk, and greet him with a particular cadence to their din and babble that is unmistakable. The evening is following its usual course, not to be deterred by almost anything, but it’s there like a low hum beneath everything else, the drunk voices, the angry and the exuberant ones.

 

Something has happened. Something that concerns everyone, and everyone knows.

 

The house is dark and empty, so James retraces his steps into the heart of the town, to the tavern. Looks attach to him as he enters, like flies that buzz off again almost immediately. He’s used to it, it comes with his name, but he’s well aware that tonight, some looks linger. This, too, is nothing new; he prefers it considerably when he’s aware of the reason for it, though.

 

He stops a pace or two short of the first set of tables, and scans the room.

 

On most nights, he wouldn’t have come looking for Thomas here, first; even though he understood some time ago that everything about Nassau, even the raucous vivacity and the incoherence of its nighttime crowds, holds a deep interest for him. James is still puzzled by the seamless ease with which Thomas took to life here. As if there were something about it that’s familiar to him.

 

When James first brought Miranda here, she chose to try and build a life in a place that belonged nowhere fully. Halfway between Nassau and the interior, a space unto itself, furnished with those few things that she could take or make, that sill resembled what she’d once known; but she lived a suspended, a waiting life.

And James didn’t care about building anything for himself if he couldn’t have the life he’d lost, and the only absence he minded, was Thomas’s.

 

Thomas is the only one of them who seems willing to take Nassau for what it is.

 

It makes sense to James only as a matter of theory. There can hardly be two things more separate, more different, than Thomas, and this place and its people.

 

At the far end of the room, where the space is recessed and marginally quieter, he finds Thomas at a table with Jack Rackham and Max, and Anne Bonny almost one with the shadows behind Jack. As James moves through the swaying, toppling crowd of drunk patrons and laughing, lively girls, Thomas shakes his head, and whatever it is Rackham is telling him with evident insistence, he isn’t convinced. James can tell because Thomas hides his lips behind his hands, like a precaution; then something makes Thomas look up, towards James, in the middle of the discussion.

 

Every time he returns like this, James hopes he isn’t just wishing so hard for the relief in Thomas’s eyes, the spark of joy at seeing him, a little worse for wear perhaps, but alive and with all limbs still attached, that he fancies it truly there. He hopes with all he has that it really _is_ there.

 

Thomas’s gaze doesn’t let go of him, and one by one, the others follow its direction to see what is more important than their conference just now. Max, who evidently prefers to stand, at the head of the table, puts one hand on her hip and speaks up just as soon as he’s within earshot. “Captain Flint,” she greets smoothly. “Your return is timely. We’ve been speaking of you. Have you come across any news of the English on your trip?”

 

The non sequitur brings him up short, and the sinking feeling that comes with her words is much more unexpected than their implications. _England. Now?_ His mind immediately amends, _Why not? Overdue, really._ He shouldn’t be shocked. He looks down at the things on the table: papers, in between cups and glasses, some of which have been repurposed as weights to pin down a curling map. Lists and numbers and routes.

 

“No. Should I have?”

 

It’s a moment before Max replies, and he thinks he discerns a trace of well-concealed disappointment in her pause. “It was a possibility. I suppose we may consider it a good thing that you didn’t.”

 

“Yes, if we squint,” Jack mutters. “Otherwise, some more information would certainly have been welcome.” He stares glumly ahead for a moment, then he tips his chair onto its hind legs, and fixates James again. “Woodes Rogers,” he states. “Do you know him?”

 

James shifts his weight from one foot to the other. “I know of him.” _Doesn’t everyone?_ He shrugs. “Privateer for the Crown. He had some successes that impressed a few people, but he tried to dupe his crews. What of him?”

 

Max breathes out a sigh that bespeaks a rather long evening of debating—what, precisely? “It would appear,” she says, “that he has been appointed our new Lord Governor. And he is on his way here. With a fleet.”

 

That, James supposes, is sufficiently outrageous news for the whole town to be abuzz with it. He studies the map on the table again and suddenly feels the toll of the past two weeks take hold of his limbs and pull; downwards, towards the floor and through it into the soil beneath, which must be cool, and dark, and still.

 

With a sense of reluctance, he pulls out the nearest chair and sits down. Hoping it looks more like taking-the-matter-seriously, than weariness.

 

“How long?”

 

“Less than three weeks, in all probability.”

 

“Where’s this coming from?”

 

Max worries the corner of the topmost of the papers in front of her, until she catches herself, and stops. “A business contact. We have no way to verify the information at this moment, but it would be imprudent of us not to assume that it is true.”

 

That, James supposes, is hardly to be argued with. He nods slowly. “So?”

 

“So.” Max exchanges a look first with Anne, then with Jack; then her eyes slip briefly to Thomas. Who meets her gaze squarely, but if she can read anything in his face, it’s more than James can do. He realises he has no idea if these two have ever spoken before today. Her intelligence must have some appeal to Thomas. James has thought a time or two that Max’s clearsighted wisdom has something in common with Miranda’s; but she’s also a politician, not a philosopher, and in all likelihood not a storyteller. If James’s crew are asking themselves just who Thomas actually is, then surely so is Max, but perhaps she never saw any real occasion to try and find out. Then, belatedly, James wonders what exactly Rackham was talking about so insistently when he came in, and what exactly it is that Thomas is here for.

 

“The fort is a priority,” Max says, her voice measured as though even she, with her quick mind and clever tongue, were choosing her words carefully as she goes along. “Our defence from the water is the other. We are agreed that you are best suited to assume command of our fleet, for the duration of our dealings with the English.” Which would explain the looks that have been directed at him since his arrival an hour ago. As if to confirm his thought, Max continues, “Word is getting around quickly. We need to formulate a clear plan and make it known, otherwise this will become chaos before long.”

 

“Charles will be in command on shore,” Jack puts in. He’s leaned in again, elbows propped on the table, and has begun plucking barbs off a quill that has seen better days altogether. “Oh, and Edward Teach is returned to us also.”

 

“Teach?” _A lot_ has happened. England is no surprise. Blackbeard is.

 

Jack drops the pen unceremoniously. “I’m fairly certain Charles has him under control for the time being, but we might do well to have a contingency plan, you know, for the long run. I don’t suspect Blackbeard, of all people, came back to be anywhere near the sidelines of this island.”

 

James suppresses a sigh, with some difficulty. “I don’t imagine.” His mind feels crowded. It isn’t a feeling he’s used to, not when it comes to strategising.

 

“Mr. Silver,” Max says, just as the man in question appears at James’s left, no doubt propelled here by the word on the street as well. Sure enough, Silver takes in the table and its occupants for a moment, and then asks, “What’s all this about an English fleet?” 

 

James can’t claim he isn’t somewhat grateful for the pause. As the conversation at the table loops back some minutes, he tries to gather his thoughts; which, however, prove unwilling, sluggish, not nearly as acute as they should be in a situation like this.He wants to search out Thomas’s gaze, to ask, _What are you thinking?,_ but Thomas isn’t looking at him now. He’s focused on the speakers as they take their turns, England governor fort fleet, although this must be at least the third time he’s hearing all this today. When Thomas does look back at James at last, there’s seriousness, and a perhaps involuntary, fleeting smile, and a trace of the same question James wants to ask; but not indication of his feelings, his thought about any of this, nothing to help James catch hold of his own mind and settle it down.

 

“These are the crews?” Silver asks, picking up one of the documents on the table.

 

Lists of names and numbers, calculations of resources and loyalties. James should probably be looking at them, too.

 

“Headcount,” Jack affirms. “We figure the more comprehensive a picture we have, the better, for this endeavour.”

 

Silver shoots James a look, waits a beat, and then begins to inquire about the details of the newborn defence plan that James is well aware he should, also, have already asked, or at least be asking himself, instead of his quartermaster. He listens, but his attention splits itself in two, and keeps half gravitating to Thomas. Ocean and moon. And he realises that this meeting is about managing Captain Flint, with his unknowable agendas and incalculable temper, as much as it is about managing what lies three weeks ahead of them all.

 

Working in concert has never been Nassau’s strong suit. This time, by the grace of enough collective common sense, or some other miracle, everyone is already prepared to put aside differences and oppositions for a stretch of time just long enough to carry them through this. For the greater good; or so at least say Max and Jack Rackham. But however far below or above the truth their estimate of English guns and troops is, they need a functional myth to even out the odds, and thus they need Captain Flint to fall in line. A notoriously difficult thing to accomplish.

 

And they’re clever people, so.

 

So, just as Eleanor once went to Miranda, so they’ve now gone to Thomas.

 

“What do you say, Captain?”

 

Silver is looking at him, again. Everyone is. They’ve arrived back at the beginning of the loop.

 

James takes up one of the lists and pretends to study it, then another few.

 

“We only have a chance if we all work together in this,” Jack says after a while. He manages to sound casual. An observation. “Especially considering that that chance relies vastly on appearances, rather than actualities.”

 

“We’ve known worse odds,” Silver replies. He lowers his voice, not enough to make his next words private, but enough to make them intimate. “This can be done. If yours is the first name they hear, that may just do as much again for us as a show of unity.” He pauses. “After the past few months—”

 

“Yes,” James says. _Yes, but be quiet_. It’s a reflexive thought, quick and hot, even though he knows it doesn’t make a difference. For the longest time, he felt himself two people, not wholly disjointed, not nearly enough, but a part of him believed he’d one day put Flint to rest and be James McGraw again. He never fooled himself that Flint would lay down without a fight, without haunting him, but with Miranda, who’d known his darknesses from the moment of their birth and sometimes shared in them, it would have been just what it was.

But he’s realising two things now: one, with Thomas, he doesn’t want to put Flint to rest, not even consolidate him; he wants to denounce and deny and eradicate him. Two, Flint is etched onto James McGraw’s skin, a tattoo that may at best lose some colour with time, blur at the edges, but it’s there to stay and it covers his whole body. Could he cut him out of his skin, or cauterise him? Not without bleeding to death, or perishing from the pain, not anymore. James doesn’t exist without Flint anymore. That’s the trouble.

 

And of course it’s both silly and pointless to not want Flint spoken of in Thomas’s presence. And cowardly, and insincere. The first thing that made Thomas associate James with Flint, he remembers, was the murder of Alfred Hamilton.

None of that makes this easier.

 

He rubs his eyelids until the darkness behind them turns bright, in an attempt to dispel the heaviness pressing against his forehead from the inside. He watches the future unfold in his mind, first one way, then another, and the weight gets denser and denser. He supposes it’s fear. It takes him a moment to recognise it because it’s been so long.

 

He looks at Thomas and thinks that he’ll believe in a victory, of course he will. It’s what he would do if he could better order his thoughts.

 

“All right,” he says, and the conversation starts again, names, numbers, routes. Silver is giving him a scrutinising look that’s equal parts satisfaction and doubt, as if to say, _Good, but just like that?_ , and he may be right to wonder. All the captains whose names preface each individual list; Vane, Teach, who must have an agenda of his own and is as yet an unknown variable; who may well view James as a rival and turn on him at just the wrong moment. _Just like that?_ James thinks, _I don’t know anymore_.

 

The thought catches him unawares. It’s not that England’s coming is unexpected. It was bound to happen sooner rather than later. There’s nothing confusing about the thing itself. And, yes, he knows he devoted less thought to it in the past months than he should have, suspended in this bubble of an impossibility become real, where Thomas is here with him; what his mind orbited around was that, the nearness and the distance, and his heart in his mouth half the time; and beyond that, only the bare minimum of day-to-day business.

 

So perhaps it slipped his notice that he doesn’t know anymore what else he wants; or if there _is_ anything else at all.

 

Silver suddenly leans towards him, close enough to jostle, and it takes James a moment to realise that it’s because someone is squeezing past him in turn, bending over the corner of the table. James vaguely recognises the man, and places him with Bill Marney’s crew.

 

“Courtesy of the Calliope,” the man announces, and clunks down a bulbous, half-blind bottle filled about two thirds with a dark liquid. Judging by his speech and movements, the other third is working its way through his veins. “All homemade.” Max raises an eyebrow at the clambering intrusion, but Jack, in his usual way of dealing with things that are randomly thrown his way, considers the bottle for a moment, then sighs and picks it up to begin pouring out generous portions into every receptacle within reach.

 

“I suppose a toast to the future won’t hurt,” he says. “Who knows how much longer we’ll have anything of the sort to drink to. Collins, is it? To what do we owe the honour?” The man shrugs. “We’re all looking forward to blowing some English out o’the water, is all.” James wonders if this is some odd pre-emptive attempt at a bribe.

 

By some silent agreement, no one at the table goes to the trouble of pointing out that the idea is for no one to get blown out of anything. Or perhaps they’re all too conscious of the fact that, intentions notwithstanding, it may still very well happen.

 

“Right,” Jack says. “And what is this, exactly?”

 

By way of reply, Collins plunges his hand into the pocket of his coat and produces a small number of dark, tough-looking bulbs with furrowed shells that he releases onto the table, where they wobble in narrow, uneven circuits for some moments. “Made with these,” he says. “Crack ‘em, I think half the alcohol got soaked up in the flesh, so you really should.”

 

James takes one of the cups Jack filled up and listens with not quite half an ear to the tale of an unlikely encounter on an unlikely route far north, that Collins launches into. At this point, he well and truly is more interested in the liquor, and whether it came out of the Calliope crew’s undoubtedly makeshift distillery with any strength in its body. Thomas picks up his glass as well, but his attention is evidently less on the drink, than on Collins. He listens with enough amusement in his eyes that James has to purse his lips to keep from smiling along. Which wouldn’t do for Captain Flint, not here and not now.

 

So perhaps it’s expedient that James is, sometimes, easily distracted. Such as when Thomas leans forward just slightly now, and James’s gaze catches on the dip between his collarbones and he thinks, _Please, let me touch you. Did you know that no one would look twice if I took your hand here?_

 

Well. They might. Look twice.

 

_But that’s all they’d do._

 

He makes himself turn away and tries to concentrate on Collins’s concoction instead.

 

The stuff is the colour of burnt sugar and has a spicy scent that James can’t readily identify. There’s a tanginess to the taste, almost as of resin, just a bit biting. It’s too sweet, but probably all the stronger for the innocence that the sugar lends, so James drinks it down. The burn of it on an empty stomach is so familiar, it’s comforting. He almost thinks it might clear his head a little.

 

“Quite fascinating,” Jack is saying in response to Collins’s narrative, the words sloping with an inflection of irony that’s certainly lost on their tipsy giver of gifts. Somewhere behind them, rowdy laughter erupts, a sound like part of the gallery collapsing and tumbling to the ground floor.

 

Thomas sets his glass down at an odd angle and the liquid spills in a small puddle that the parched map immediately begins to drink up.

 

“But I still don’t know what these things are. Wood pebbles? Balls of baked dirt?”

 

Collins guffaws, and needs a moment to recollect himself before he can answer.

 

Thomas has stopped listening. He says, “Excuse me a moment,” his voice barely carrying over the laughter and the chatter. James doesn’t have time to make enough sense of it before Thomas has risen to his feet, and slipped away. He turns and tries to trace Thomas through the crowd, but loses him quickly amongst the haze of smoke and the bright colours of the girls’ dresses swirling through it.

 

Silver’s voice registers, but the words drown in the noise in his head now. The stain on the map is still blooming, swallowing a few minute islands like a preternatural wave. James puts down his glass and follows Thomas.

 

*

 

Thomas is in the courtyard behind the tavern, where only few people congregate on nights like this, when there’s business to be discussed in the streets. The sounds from inside aren’t quite muted, but the din doesn’t feel like a cocoon, and the air is clearer and cooler.

 

James takes the three steps up to the porch all at once, but then he slows his pace, and stops, suddenly uncertain.

 

Thomas has leaned on the banister, both palms pressed firmly against the wood and his fingers spread out, as if he wanted to feel the surface as immediately as possible. He doesn’t seem tense, but there’s something very schooled about the loose lines of his shoulders and arms and the bend of his head. There’s no colour in his face, and James doesn’t think it’s only the lack of light that has drained it.

 

Thomas doesn’t notice him, not even when James calls his name the first time. The second time, he looks up. He blinks, and then his eyes flit over James’s shoulder, and back again.

 

“What are you doing?” His voice still sounds as thin as it did inside a few moments ago.

 

“What’s the matter?” James asks back.

 

“It’s nothing.” The reply comes too quickly, but Thomas takes a breath, and repeats, “Nothing,” and this time it sounds firmer. Like he’s telling himself more than James, perhaps, but even so. “Go back inside.”

 

“There’s no need. The decision’s made. Nothing more’s going to happen tonight.”

 

Thomas shakes his head, but if he was taken aback by James’s presence, his consternation now softens and turns to something else, something that tugs at the corners of his mouth ever so slightly.

 

“You’re giving everyone in there the impression that seeing what might have gotten into me matters more to you than what’s being talked about at that table.”

 

James shrugs. “Perhaps it does.”

 

Thomas huffs. “Perhaps it shouldn’t.” But he finally gives up on his attempt at being properly put out, and lets himself smile. Even if only faintly, like he doesn’t quite have the strength for it.

 

So James steps closer and asks again, “What’s wrong?”

 

The smile fades. “Just—” He presses his lips together, and for a moment searches James’s eyes; then he looks away and hunches his shoulders. A bit like he wants to shrug it off, but also like he’s trying to make his skin stretch the right way over his bones again.

“The smell of that stuff. It just reminded me of something they’d make me drink.” As always, he doesn’t say, _at Bethlem_. “The effects of it were very unpleasant.” He seems lost in the recollection for a moment, then he glances up at James, and the faint smile returns. Perhaps with a hint of exasperation at the expression he’s met with. “It’s all right, James. It just caught me unawares, that’s all.”

 

“All right,” James echoes reluctantly. “I just—” He tries to stop the memory, but it’s too quick and nimble for him.

 

The first morning, dawn as cold and still as a tomb, breaking with slow greyness over the pier, over London, over Miranda and him. Neither of them had slept, and he’d wondered if Thomas had, or what waking must have felt like on that day. He knew then that he’d never forget the feeling of thinking of him in that moment, and he hasn’t. The knowledge that their lives were severed and that no thought, no word and no reminder of love would reach Thomas anymore in a place that would hurt him, compared to nothing James had ever experienced.

He wants to say, _I’ll never forgive myself for leaving you in that place,_ and, _No matter what you_ knew _to be true, you must have_ felt _abandoned,_ but he knows Thomas wouldn’t let him. He said it once, something much like it, and Thomas replied, _What would you have done, James? Killed them all?_ His voice as gentle as James’s own was sharp and rough when he spat, _Why not?_ It was said before he knew it and it was one of the first moments that Flint escaped from behind the face of McGraw.

 

That feeling, too, he hasn’t forgotten.

 

But now he wonders if he’s spoken any of it out loud after all, because Thomas says, “I’m glad you didn’t see me in that place. I don’t know if you can imagine it. Miranda went there, once. I don’t know why, and I don’t think she did either, afterwards. The smells and the sounds of it. It’s enough to drive anyone mad. I can’t understand how people take that for an afternoon’s diversion.” He pauses, and looks at James. The smile is still there on his lips, but his eyes are distant in a way that unsettles James for a moment. “Civilisation and monsters, right?”

 

He shakes his head, and returns to surveying the shadowed courtyard again. The sky, where it touches the roof ridge on the west side of the house, is a deep, saturated blue, but still luminous. Everything below, as though the dusk colours were mist, is already shrouded in opacity, greys gradually darkening.

 

“Sometimes I thought I saw you there. You and Miranda. I was so relieved, every time I blinked, and you were gone, and I knew it was just my mind playing tricks.”

 

James doesn’t know how to respond. This is the most Thomas has ever spoken about Bethlem, and it’s unexpected and he isn’t sure he should be feeling relief, of all things.

 

His confusion dispels (or rather changes shape) when Thomas suddenly laughs, short and breathy, a little self-deprecatingly. “I hate it when this happens.”

 

“What?” James asks, carefully.

 

Thomas doesn’t answer at once. He’s silent for so long, James begins to think he’s slipped away again. But then he says, “Sometimes my mind goes back there, and I can’t do anything about it but wait for it to pass. It’s not always something as concrete as … walnuts.” He laughs again, and James leans against the banister too, pressing the small of his back against the edge and curling his fingers around it until he feels the splinters of the unpolished wood dig into his fingertips: so he won’t reach out and pull Thomas close.

 

“Most of the time I don’t know what it is. It … clouds up my mind.” He rubs his eyes. “I’m sorry.”

 

James tightens his grip until he feels a sharp prick between the digits of his right index finger. “Tell me what I can do?”

 

Thomas looks at him for a while, with the same searching gaze as before. As though he feels lost, and is looking for something safe. “Find us something to drink that hasn’t had any nuts in it?”

 

James smiles, and relaxes. It isn’t the kind of answer he hoped for, perhaps, but Thomas hasn’t shuttered and he isn’t asking James to leave him be, and for now, James is willing to chalk that up as progress.

 

When he comes back a few minutes later with a bottle of port, Thomas has settled at a small table out in the courtyard, just close enough to the porch that the light that streams from the windows still reaches. James pours out the wine, the colour changing with light and shadow between pitch and ruby, and briefly, without warning, the present envelops him completely, in a way it hasn’t done since London, when all with his world was still perfect.

The music inside is a little too fast, but it’s bright and harmonious and careless, and the air has the soft, yielding texture of the year more than half gone, the first forecasting steps towards the island winter of milder, windswept days and cooler nights. The quiet in the courtyard floats, buoy-like, on the surface of the sounds of revelry inside and murmured conversations nearby.

 

He sits down slowly and watches Thomas sip the wine, and wishes that this were it. One evening like this after the other, a life in the midst of it all, just this much apart from everyone else. And the world might take whatever course it will. What would it even matter?

 

The last shimmer of the sunken sun disappears from the sky above them, and the far side of the courtyard dissolves into shadow. Thomas watches the darkness bloom, lost in thought; but he doesn’t seem distracted anymore now, just glad of the quiet. So James reaches into the inside pocket of his coat and produces the book. It’s a well-maintained volume, perhaps seldom-read, bound in leather the colour of a fir forest in winter, even though now, it seems just black. He places it on the table next to Thomas’s hand.

 

“I used to do this for Miranda,” he says quietly. “I think she’d read every book in her house ten times over eventually, so I began to bring her others when I could.”

 

Thomas smiles at that; the way he always does now when they speak of Miranda. Very tenderly, and as though there wasn’t a painful memory attached to thinking of her. As though there were a peace in it that foils even the pain of her loss and the knowledge of her unhappiness.

 

And yet, in spite of this, he still hasn’t been to Miranda’s house. James thought it’d be the first thing he’d want to do, but when they arrived, and walked up the beach and along the streets slowly, and James began to describe the way to the house, Thomas only said, _Not yet_. He didn’t explain himself, and he hasn’t brought it up since.

 

All her books are in the house in Nassau now (all except one), next to those they took from Antwerp. Thomas smiled that same way when James first brought them, it was clear he remembered them. He looked through them all that day. James just waited.

As he and Miranda were leaving London, he didn’t pay attention to what she chose to take. The painting made his whole chest compress, but only because it was such an evident reminder. He only realised much later, when he, too, picked up a book again at her cottage, what it was that she’d wanted to salvage.

 

In some of the books, on some of the pages, there’s no blank space left. The print is framed by Miranda’s elegant, fluid hand, and Thomas’s larger, bolder script. The margins are transformed into conversations, where they argued over a point, agreed, teased each other, digressed entirely. It’s a chronicle of their relationship, and a record of their love and their regard for one another. The whole extraordinariness of it all.

 

He stood by the bookcase in her house, and hardly knew what book it was he was holding in his hands. He read only the handwritten words, spellbound and feeling like a trespasser. But Miranda didn’t seem to mind that he was looking at something so private that had been so entirely and importantly hers and Thomas’s.

She didn’t mind sharing her memory. Quite the opposite. But the reading brought tears to James’s eyes then, and he never did it afterwards; he knows the books gave her comfort, but he couldn’t understand how.

 

“ _The Odyssey_ ,” Thomas says. He’s been tracing the edge of the book on the table, but now he stops and just lets his hand rest on top of it, fingertips obscuring the letters embossed in gold. His eyes flick up and he studies James, wreathed in his silence that seems to have become so much a part of him. He appears amused, but there’s something wistful about it, too. “Which one of us is Penelope?”

 

“… Beg pardon?”

 

Thomas chuckles. He waves his question away easily, _I’m joking,_ although James, once his mind has caught up, wonders, _Are you?_

 

It’s a good question.

 

“I’ll admit I’ve missed it, somewhere between the _Metamorphoses_ and the _Aeneid_. But she never liked it all that much, did she? All that disguise and illusion. Neither of them things she was very fond of.”

 

James laughs. “No, she didn’t use to.” There was a conversation once, begun by chance over late glasses of wine and a throwaway reference made by one of them, James can’t recall now if it was him or Thomas or Miranda herself. But he does recall her annoyance with Homer, and the laughter and the happiness of the argument all the more clearly for the details that have slipped away.

 

But that was then.

 

“She came to like it better with time.” Enough to read bits to James, a time or two. _When another traveller falls in with you and calls that weight across your shoulder a fan to winnow grain._ The home at the end of the journey. “She did have it. She took the copy from your library with her.” Perhaps that was premonition. “I suppose, over the years, some things began to resonate more with her. Both of us.” _A_ _people who know nothing of the sea._

 

He takes a breath. “She took it on the journey to Charlestown, to read on the ship. I—don’t know what happened to it.”

 

Towards the end, his voice nearly gets whittled away. _It’s lost. And she’s lost_. _I don’t know what happened to her._

When he went back to Charlestown a year ago, he stood in the marketplace for some time, Thomas’s letter in his hand, his whole being numb and set aflame at the same time. He surveyed the destruction, the cloven stones, splintered, sere wood, singed and torn rags, frayed wickerwork. He stood and wondered if he’d be able to turn his head, turn his eyes towards where he knew she’d been. In the end, he turned the other way.

 

But now here it is again, _The Odyssey._ It must seem to Thomas like a strange thing to have done. To have chosen, out of all of them, this haunted book. With so much pain bound up with the threading, pressed between the pages like wildflowers; her loss, and his betrayal. The promise that he gave her at last, after all her waiting, that there _would_ be a life other than the one she couldn’t learn to love; that he then broke twice over.

 

Yet when he saw the book aboard the Ilfracombe, it gave him the strangest sense of coherence. Like a kind of haunting that might knit things together, not unravel them. Because its pages hold also things she felt and thought in the years of her separation from Thomas, and her unconquerable hope. And thus it seemed to him like he might, with the book and all its ghosts, bring some of Miranda’s life back to Thomas; and like he might, perhaps, in the end, keep the promise he made her, to him.

 

But ghosts, he should have known, are arbitrary and volatile, and as he looks at the book now, what he thinks (for the hundredth, thousandth time) is, _If only I hadn’t let her die_.

 

If only she were still here with them, too, perhaps they could be truly brazen and face down the past and deny it all the purchase it has on the present. Sometimes he thinks that that would be all it took. _But she’s gone. We’re here, and you’re alive, but she’s gone. And I can’t give you anything that doesn’t come with pain and regret._

 

“Thank you,” Thomas says. There’s a softness to his voice like a caress, fingertips across the back of the hand that want to bring James back from whatever inhospitable, chilling place his mind is wandering into. Away from this mild Nassau night on the edge of carefreeness and exuberance. And it’s easy to go with Thomas, all too easy, but he does it anyway and gladly.

 

He smiles, leans back and asks, “Do you wonder, sometimes, how it would have been if we’d come here all those years ago, like we meant to?”

 

Thomas inclines his head as if in contemplation, and the light from the windows behind them slips around him so that shadows pool, in the folds of his shirt and along his neck, and articulate each of his breaths. _I could take your hand_.

 

“If you’d been appointed governor, and we’d have come to live here, you and Miranda and me. Away from all the gossips and their prying eyes and their false morals and their envy.” _Just lived. And no one would have looked twice._

 

“What are you talking about, James?” Thomas is studying him with an expression half perplexity and half astonishment. A small frown and a small smile.

 

“You know,” James says, and tries not to feel hurt that Thomas can’t quite seem to make the connection. _You couldn’t forget, could you?_ “Our—” _Dream._ “Plan. What we were going to do once the pardons were ratified.”

 

Thomas is silent for a moment. Then he says, “I didn’t know that’s what we were going to do,” and the last syllable just seems to steal a bit of his breath.

 

“Of course you do,” James replies, but the words won’t come with as much certainty as he would wish, thoughts lagging behind emotions, or the other way around. “We talked about it.” _All the time._

 

Thomas shakes his head slowly. “That wasn’t me you were talking to.”

 

For a moment, James thinks, _Miranda, of course_. But then he remembers her face, he remembers suggesting it to her, he remembers the rain. He’d thought she would hear him and fall in love with the idea of living freely the same way he had, when he’d seen Nassau that first time, and seen Thomas again after that. But Miranda looked at the things around her, the room with its beautiful objects, with an expression like she already missed London. Like she had an inkling she wouldn’t be staying much longer, no matter what she said or tried to the contrary.

 

“I’m sorry,” Thomas says. “I didn’t—” He breaks off. His voice has gone translucent. It makes James look up, and try to see through the shadows and the glow from the tavern that is too downy to leave anything discernible but vague outlines, but they’re on Thomas’s side. All he can make out is something escaping, hiding itself away in Thomas’s eyes. Whatever it is that he didn’t, he won’t say now. Instead, he repeats, “I’m sorry.” Voice stronger the second time, as before. “I wish it had happened that way.”

 

James smiles. “Yes,” he says. “So do I.” _But I could take your hand here. Won’t you let me?_ So much time they’ve already lost.

 

“Although, on second thought,” Thomas continues, “perhaps we’d have only been blown out of the water. Was that the phrase?”

 

For a moment, James is caught between the _second thought_ and the unexpected change in tone; and then he laughs. “It was. Yes. Perhaps.” _Perhaps._

 

A different memory bounds through his mind, of a different conversation and this time he knows, he _knows_ he doesn’t misremember. _Are you sure three ships would be enough?_ He knows the memory is true because _I think I fell in love with you then. I spent days just stacking up odds and telling you I didn’t believe in your vision, but you just refused to lose heart._

 

But Thomas is right, even in jest. Three ships, when now they’ll take on eight and any number of guns, any number of soldiers, if it comes to it; unity or no, three ships would have been easy any time. There’s no telling what would have happened, how the dream would have ended.

 _Perhaps_.

But it was never put to the test and so it never failed, and it’s still a perfect vision in James’s mind, bright enough to hurt the eye.

 

James pushes his hair back and feels the greasiness of days of salty spray on his palm. For some reason, the cacophonous chorus of nighttime birds and insects suddenly manifests clearly in his consciousness, intermingling with the sounds of Nassau’s human nocturnals. The sky has shed any trace of dusk and is black as coal, star-strewn.

 

Something glints, too, in the corner of his eye, and as he tracks it he finds the golden letters again, _The Odyssey_.

 

 _All that wandering_ , he thinks. And all at once, he feels like the countless what-ifs, the countless ways in which things could have been different, exist somewhere in the sphere of his life or this world, and combine into one massive weight that settles on his soul. He thinks of Charlestown again, talking to Miranda just before everything went wrong; saying it to Peter, even. _To live quietly_. It was time then, it has been time for time on end, it’s so terribly overdue now. _I could take your hand_.

 

“Thomas—” he starts, and then hesitates. Part of him balks at the question he wants to ask, out of conviction as much as out of habit. But between this evening and his memories and what may come, he wonders, he wonders.

“Do you think we should let it happen? Let England take this place back?” And stop. Put an end to the fighting and live quietly. _Put an end to this narrative where I’m a monster and my name spells death, and you—what about you?_

 

Thomas looks away, as though something in the darkness beyond the corner of the tavern had caught his attention. He’s so quiet, it seems like he’s holding his breath. Finally, he sighs, and turns back to James, but only halfway. Eyes on the nothingness between here and the other side of the courtyard.

 

“I’m not sure you could. After everything I’ve heard in there today…” He pauses, and smiles; crookedly, a bit like before, _I hate it when this happens_ , but less tense. “Even I can see it might be hard to persuade them of any other course of action than the one you’ve agreed on. If you try might cause the rift you can’t afford.”

 

James nods slowly. He half expected Thomas to resent the question, at least a bit. All that pain and loss only to surrender now. And he half expected him to say that even that would be better than risking the guns and the troops and bloodshed. But his answer has no inflection either way. It’s only true. And if in doubt, the truth should be the best counsellor, surely. James doesn’t know why he feels more uncertain now than before he asked.

 

“You don’t think it’s going to work the way the others hope,” Thomas says.

 

 _Don’t I?_ James wonders. Perhaps he doesn’t.

 

“I don’t know,” he replies after a few moments. His thumb catches on a chip in the rim of glass; he’s absently pushed it out of the reach of the light and the wine is dark and opaque again like some otherworldly substance. He drains it in one draught and pours out more. “It may. I don’t believe isn’t impossible, but it depends very much on what kind of man Rogers is.”

 

Thomas follows the movements of his hands thoughtfully. He hasn’t touched his own glass much. As James is picking up the bottle, he asks, “Have you read his book?”

 

Which is, if course, a question Thomas would ask. James shakes his head, and can’t help a smirk. “No. The subject matter seemed a little trite.”

 

That makes Thomas laugh. “I imagine it would have paled by comparison,” he says, and James takes another few sips. It’s better this way, the port. Small sips instead of the gulps that make the rum go down more easily, or befit ale. He remembers having to acquire a taste for the fine things he began to be served more and more as people of rank and station began to take note of him. He remembers never quite acquiring it, too, but tonight, somehow, he does enjoy it.

 

“For what it’s worth,” Thomas says, “he doesn’t strike me as someone who’ll turn tail and not risk some losses for the gain.”

 

James supposes that all considered, it may not be surprising that the most concrete assessment of the evening— _Eight ships, but we don’t know how many guns. Three weeks, but we don’t know for certain._ —comes from a book. He sighs. “If he isn’t, there’ll be war here.”

 

The thought, for all its perfect familiarity, sends a shiver down his spine. The day was going to come from the moment he decided he would fight England for the islands that were going to be their future. There have been times when he wished he could summon that day, instead of having to wait for it. But it’s been a very long time since he’s wished it wouldn’t come.

 

He’s never wished it wouldn’t.

 

“You’ll make the right choice,” Thomas says, and damn him for having turned himself into a book of seven seals and reading James so adroitly all the same. It feels, for just a moment, like a betrayal, and cracks James’s composure because his mind is suddenly swarming and all he can think is, _I don’t know what’s right. You’re the one who knows that._

 

“We came across a prize on the way back from Barbados,” he says, and downs the rest of the wine in his glass. “The Ilfracombe. I sunk her.” He realises he’s spilled some wine on his hand and wipes it on his breeches. “Her cargo and that book are the only things that didn’t go to the bottom of the ocean.”

 

 _This is how I don’t know what’s right_ , he thinks, and he sets his jaw, but he doesn’t expect Thomas’s patience to snap at this, out of everything.

 

Perhaps he hadn’t realised that patience came into it at all.

 

Thomas says nothing for just a moment, and this silence feels like restraint, but then he decides against that. “What do you want to hear, James?” he asks. “ _How could you?_ I assume you ordered your crew to fire at her until she sank. _You shouldn’t have?_ How would I know? Perhaps you shouldn’t have, perhaps you didn’t need to. Perhaps you had no choice. I assume you did what you had to do.”

 

He stops, and doesn’t break eye contact. James has never known Thomas to lash out, and he hasn’t done it now. Perhaps his nerves are still a little frayed, not quite mended again after the episode just a little while ago, but even so the words were meant.

 

It’s a thing that James always perceived with amazement, and no small amount of disbelief. There’s courage in the insistence on the meaning of words because it ties them to truth and sincerity in a way that is indelible and rare in a world made of glib prattle and gone-back-on insurances, and lies. Rare and dangerous.

 

But all his amazement doesn’t help him come up with a response now. Instead, it flips itself over into a tight, swift surge of panic that spells, _I don’t understand you_ , and he’s the one that looks away. He tries to swallow his panic, dislodge it from where it’s stuck in his throat. And that’s easy, because suddenly he feels Thomas’s hand in his hair, on his cheek, his fingers along his jaw.

 

It’s so unexpected, and James instinctively closes his eyes, torn between trying not to feel it too much, and feeling it entirely and instead of everything else. But Thomas drops his hand again too soon, and now there’s apology in the way he’s looking at James, the beginning of a frown, as though the touch was reflex even if the words before weren’t, and he’d rather have been able to help it.

 

“I’ve been wondering about something, too,” Thomas says. “Did you ever really, truly believe in all of it? Our plan for this place, the pardons? Or were you just in love with me?”

 

James stares at him. “Was I just in love with you?” he repeats. _Was I just in love with you?_ His mind spins around the question weightlessly a few times over. Until something latches somewhere and he thinks he understands what Thomas is asking him. His first impulse is to tell Thomas that of course he believed in it. Still believes in it. But then he realises that perhaps he owes Thomas more than that. Owes more to both of them.

 

“Perhaps you’re right,” he says. Softly, testing the words for truth as he speaks them, entirely new as they are. “Perhaps I don’t know. If I believed in it. No matter that I know without any doubt that what you wanted was right. But,” his voice hitches just the slightest bit; imperceptibly, he thinks. “I wasn’t just in love with you. I’m not just in love with you now.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I thought I might, in fact, add a note on the nuts. These are black walnuts, and they came into the story by virtue of the fact that, according to my research (mostly A History of Bethlem, by Jonathan Andrews, Asa Briggs, &.c, &c. in case anyone is wondering), things that would certainly have been practiced at the time Thomas would have been there (and let me tell you, it's not easy to be certain about how things would have been, precisely) as so-called evacuative treatments, were bleeding, purging and vomiting. Black walnut can be used to the latter effect, although I have no idea if they did use it - black walnuts were known and being shipped across the Atlantic at the time, but that's as much as I could find out about them. And lastly, all that sort of comes from that one scene in Whitechapel where black walnut comes up. There you go!


	7. Chapter 7

He has a dream that he thinks he’s had before, more than once, although he can’t be sure. When he wakes, and the real night asserts itself, the things that cling to his memory feel very familiar, but he can’t pinpoint the moments in time when this has happened before.

 

The truth is that he never dreamt much. He used to wonder, once upon a time, what that meant, but eventually he became grateful for the fact, rather than puzzled by it. Because after London, he never dreamt at all. Until Miranda.

 

In the dream, he’s walking through London. He recognises it, but only barely. The street beneath his boots seems like muddy water, the stones of the houses smudged and frosted. Sometimes the doors and windows are gone, or almost gone, like they’ve sunk into the walls and been grown over with brick and limestone lichen.

 

There are people around him, walking in the opposite direction, or passing him swiftly, crossing his path some paces ahead. They look and sound like wind. All their outlines blurred, swept this way and that. Faces like a painter’s brush slipped. The silence that expands underneath everything is vast and hollow, but the sounds—swish of skirts and cloaks, drag of canes and heels, whispers (are there whispers?)—are dry, echoless, close.

 

He’s looking for someone.

 

Thomas. Who else would he ever be looking for?

 

But he doesn’t recognise the street, nor any of the buildings, doesn’t recognise enough. He doesn’t know if this is the City, or Westminster; perhaps he’s in a different town altogether, it isn’t impossible. The sky is bone-white and has drunk up the steeples and towers that might have been his landmarks and his map.

 

He’s wearing his naval uniform, but things have come loose: the braids, buttons, the seams. The fabric is dusty, and so is his skin. He turns into a house, walks up dim narrow stairs, into a room: his old lodgings. From the single chair that remains there, he watches the slate grey window beyond which there might as well be a void, or water so deep that nothing that requires light to live still exists there.

 

Outside, a sound rises, dense, bulbous, deafening already even while it’s still far away: a hurricane. Soon, the trees will be thrashing, struggling for a little while before they’re uprooted, and the tiles will be lifted off the roofs, then the brick and stone and the glass, in jumbled flocks like birds. He’s seen such storms in the West Indies, a time or two. He didn’t know they came all the way here.

 

Then there’s a knock, dry, echoless, close to the ear, and he goes to the door. The man on the other side looks like Peter, though with the colours smeared where the brush slipped, James can’t tell for certain. Peter is telling him something, but his words are mute. Motioning with his paint-daubed hand, he sends James into the darkness, which isn’t a darkness but a room where he finds Thomas; and then his heart thumps against his ribs hard enough to make him jolt awake and sit up on his bed.

 

He never once dreamt of Thomas dead while he thought it was so. He doesn’t know why he has to dream it now.

 

It nearly makes him sick, although part of his brain marks that Samuel Collins’s blasted liquor may be having a part in that.

 

He drank more of it than he meant to, back inside the tavern, after Silver had come to find him in the courtyard. As he talked, agreed and disagreed, with Max and Silver, Rackham and Featherstone, who had also reappeared, something made James reach for the bottle time and again, like a knotted muscle or a locked bone he kept trying and trying to shrug or roll away, but it wouldn’t go. He has little more than a vague recollection of what was, in the end, spoken of and discarded and resolved. It doesn’t matter, because they’ve written it all down, but these things shouldn’t get away from him so easily, with just a dream.

 

Its images and feeling are as slow to leave off his muddled mind as the haze of the drink is, and the texture of it clings to his skin like fog, clammy and cold.

 

He tries to wash it away, to rub his thought clear along with his eyes, his brow, his neck, but he feels the same locked bones, the same bunched muscles, and the movements sting and pull. His mind stumbles back to Thomas’s reaction to the liquor earlier and vaguely he wonders, _Is this what it did? The stuff they gave you?_ Mind wound up into knots and flipped inside out, and body all wrong.

 

After the tavern, he came to the house and just stood there for a while, the edge of a doorframe digging into his back, trying to put a finger on why everything felt so wrong. He watched the undulating candlelight that told him Thomas was there. He wanted to go in and ask, _Didn’t you hear what I told you? I love you._

 

But, standing there, he finally realised it was hopeless. Because Thomas heard him clear as day, and he said nothing in return (nothing at all, not even, _But I don’t anymore._ ); wrapped himself in his silence and turned away. Until Silver appeared. James closed his eyes and pressed his head against the doorframe too.

 

He must have gone to his bedroom then, and fallen asleep.

 

The moonlight that fans across the floorboards tells him that it isn’t much later now: he may have slept an hour, perhaps not even as long. He wishes he could go back to sleep so his thoughts would stop, but for that, the edge of the drunkenness has worn off too much. And anyway, if he sleeps again, perhaps he’ll dream again.

 

From the doorway, he sees that the candles are still burning, and he has an inkling that he shouldn’t go there. The things that have replaced his drunken confusion are so ferocious, they prick is eyes (no, that’s the water, sleep, exhaustion—), but his heart won’t even let him hesitate this time. It’s still so used to bruising itself against Thomas’s absence at every turn, that sometimes, reality doesn’t do much to keep all the wounds from reopening, and the feeling of the dream that lingers and lingers is just too close to home.

 

Yes, he should be going out, perhaps, down to the beach to let the sea anchor him with its night-time chill and the sting of the salt. There’s a gash just above his ankle, where someone, already on the ground, struck out at him once more, and the blade cut through the leather of his boot and his skin, and somehow missed the sinew. (James barely looked when he shot him.) Miranda would have mended the boot for him. As it is, the slashed leather keeps worrying the wound, and the ocean would do him good. Such things work wonders. Pain of the body does. It would be better, safer than being near Thomas, but he thinks he might scream if he doesn’t see him now.

 

Thomas is reading by the light of the candles, of course, but James doesn’t bother to try and see what the book is. When he walks in, he stops and looks up.

 

“James. Has something happened?”

 

James doesn’t reply, because he barely hears the question. But he does feel Thomas’s touch, urgent with concern, and he whirls away, _All this touching, all of a sudden, why?_ It’s like his whole body has been burnt, or his skin is too tight, swollen or infected, and the touch feels scalding.

 

Thomas instantly retreats, possibly as surprised by James’s reaction as James is himself, although it’s really nothing new, is it? Everything between them is an inversion of what it should be.

 

Carefully, Thomas asks, “What’s wrong?”

 

“What’s wrong?” James repeats, voice grating on the words like metal on stone. “Everything!” And he’s shouting, although he tries not to, but the words are all but clawing their way out. “Everything is fucking wrong! Why didn’t you come to us?”

 

Thomas goes very still. His hands are turned towards James, offering a spot to anchor, but now he’s letting them sink slowly to his sides.

 

“When you’d had Peter’s letter,” James ploughs on, “why didn’t you do anything?” He realises, dimly, that he’s been forbidding himself to think about this. Must have been. But with everything inside of him laid low, it’s staring him in the face so bluntly and bleakly, he can’t look away again.

 

“Answer me!” he demands. He can hear his voice grow desperate, and feels himself getting angry. “Were you ever going to come and find us?”

 

He wills Thomas to be hurt, upset, outraged; anything that James himself would be at the implications of the question; all that he _is_ even as he asks it. But Thomas is looking at him with his distant eyes and his sealed lips, and James feels sick again.

 

But then Thomas says, “Of course,” and suddenly it’s the long pause that makes it true. “Of course I was going to. I could never have—”

 

“What, stayed away indefinitely?” James cuts him off. With the relief of Thomas’s answer, his anger revives immediately. “Then why did you at all? Thomas? It was just a few months. Just a few months, and none of it would have happened. She’d still be alive.”

 

Thomas’s face crunches up like he’s felt a sudden pain, and he doesn’t turn away quickly enough to hide it. He stays poised like that for a moment, body angled away, gaze into the shadowed room behind him. James can’t tell what he’s looking at. There’s nothing there except the furniture, and perhaps the book Thomas left on the table when he stood up just moments ago. From across the room, its colour looks to be green, but the candlelight may have changed it to that.

 

“Neither of us would have—” James says, but then he stops again because he’s overwhelmed all anew by the injustice of how different things might be, if only fate had been kinder. Only a little kinder, after everything. _If she were still here_ , he thinks, _we’d be happy now_. Surely nothing else could matter more than all three of them being together, no past and no deed?

 

Thomas moves slowly to sit at the foot of the bed, almost cautiously, like he’s trying to calm James down only by being calm and grounded himself. He says, “I know,” and James realises only then how harsh his words were, how harsh a reminder of Miranda. But around the words, in his mind, all is blank, because it’s only the truth. Time did them an ill turn. But he wants to know how it could. Where it got in and ate everything away. And so he won’t allow Thomas to calm him down, not even with the way he’s looking at him now, with a kind of readiness to face James’s anger, to let it unfurl.

 

Only that isn’t enough, James thinks, and so he says (almost yells again), “For god’s sake, Thomas, talk to me!” Thomas blinks, in that tight way that wants to shut the moment out, and James almost wants to take Thomas by the shoulder and shake him, so words would tumble out. So they’d just come lose, and with no time to be shaped or chosen for suitability. Eloquence will do nothing for them here. And then that thought spins itself around and his anger flares again.

 

“You can talk the world inside out and the Royal Society onto its head, but you can’t say anything to me now?”

 

“I was on the brink of leaving at least a hundred times,” Thomas says, with suddenness, as if James finally _did_ manage to shake his heart into his mouth. “Never more so than when I first held Peter’s letter in my hands. I wanted to drop everything, of course _I_ did.” He stops for moment, as if to catch his breath. When he continues, his voice is slightly lower, the words slightly more deliberate. “Why do you think we could leave Antwerp so quickly? I was always half aboard a ship from the moment I knew you were here. But nine years is such a long time, James. Especially when time doesn’t stand still.” He smiles wryly, and like it splits his lips. “You and Miranda, you’d been together all those years. And I didn’t know if I should, perhaps, just let you continue with the life that you’d built here. If I didn’t perhaps owe you that. To let the past be.” He rubs his eyes. “You have to believe me that I couldn’t have been so unselfish for much longer. But I was having some trouble finding the courage to turn back the clock like that. And I’m so sorry for it. But that’s how it is.” His voice twists, like the words feel every bit as wrong as the reality they describe, but it can’t wind itself free.

 

James barely registers the nuances. His mind has snagged on, _Let the past be_. “How could you possibly,” he says, not nearly kindly enough, “think that we wouldn’t have wanted you here with us? Is that what you’re telling me? Thomas, you couldn’t _possibly_ —” He stops, because the rush of his words cuts off his breath.

 

Thomas closes his eyes. And James suddenly realises that he’s so unfazed, unfazed if not unmoved, because this is all familiar to him. He’s thought about it a hundred times the same way James has revisited the past a hundred times and tried in vain to make it connect with the future.

 

Thomas opens his eyes again. “How long did we have, James?” he asks quietly. “Eight months, I think? And half the time you were away.”

 

“What difference does that make?” James retorts. He feels again like earlier. _I don’t understand you._ (Distantly, he thinks, _Only eight months?_ ) He wants to blame his swimming head, but somehow he knows that that isn’t what’s making Thomas’s words incomprehensible to him. He isn’t even certain what they’re talking about now.

 

“You hardly knew me.” There’s an odd nip at the beginning of the verb; like Thomas almost said something different. “But you lost everything because of me. Is it such a stretch of the imagination to think that you might have come to resent me for that? That you might have realised, when you had to leave your life and your future and your very self behind, and start anew, amongst all this, and be bloodied and battered and cast out, that it wasn’t worth it?”

 

 _Not worth it_. James tries to make sense of the suggestion for a moment, before he decides that he best not grace it with an answer. Flatly, he says, “Fine.” The way he’d concede a point for the sake of the argument, all those years ago. Only then he always smiled the word. “But Miranda. You can’t have thought that she wouldn’t have wanted to see you again. To know that you were _alive,_ at least?”

 

Thomas shakes his head. But after a moment, he says, _“_ You and Miranda are very different.”

 

“Not in loving you!” James shouts, and Thomas just barely manages not to grimace. James can see it in the line of his mouth, at the corners of his eyes, and he wishes there were something within reach that he could break. “For god’s sake, why won’t you let me even say this to you, Thomas? Why won’t you hear it?”

 

“Because you don’t know what you’re saying, James!” Thomas returns, and he sounds almost desperate all of sudden. “I’m not an allegory!” He all but springs to his feet, agitated, and turns away once more, as if propelled by having said something he didn’t mean to say.

 

“What?” James asks, “What the hell does that mean?” _Don’t give me metaphor now_ , he thinks. _This is not an abstraction._ If the words slipped from Thomas’s lips unbidden, he needn’t worry, because they make no sense to James; and he has not the patience now to try and retrace whatever turns Thomas’s mind may have taken to produce them. But they’ve ground to a halt, as they always, always do, and he should have seen it coming, but _For heaven’s sake,_ “ _Now_ you go silent again?”

 

He’s never seen Thomas lost for words. When he’s said nothing, it’s always been deliberate, and that has hardly made his silences easier to endure, but now he just can’t speak and that’s quite unbearable to James. And all that Thomas seems to be able to say is, “I can’t—,” and nothing more than that, but that’s altogether the wrong thing. All about this is altogether wrong.

 

Never would James have thought it possible that he could feel anything akin to contempt for Thomas, and he knows, he _knows_ it’s pain masquerading because he’s getting too tired of feeling the thing itself, but that barely makes a difference in this moment. He doesn’t know who he wants to get away from more, Thomas, or himself. “Well, then …” he murmurs, and wishes he could stop thinking and feeling, or fall asleep again and wake in another life.

 

 


End file.
